US Antitrust law is among its most archaic, even though they are relatively young. Even the term Trust speaks to an a term that is no longer in common parlance. As there is discussion about 'breaking up' Facebook and others, the murkiness of the law is painfully clear. They should be referred to as competition laws, and they should be plainly understood and work at preventing and penalizing anti-competitive behavior.…
This is why although I'm a bit supporter of GDPR and other such regulations, I think there is some truth in the idea that they also "lock-in" the larger players, because of 2 primary reasons:
1) the fine/punishment is never significant enough to the point that all of the ill-gained wealth is entirely wiped out. However, maybe it can't/shouldn't be fully wiped out anyway, because then we enter into the realm of applying laws retroactively a bit, and that brings all sorts of other dangers with it.
2) they block the newer entrants from using the same unethical tactics to effectively compete. However, I don't think this is a good excuse against not enabling such laws. Getting stuck with a couple of monopolies that can still be further regulated down the road isn't as bad as everyone stealing people's data and abusing it for personal gain, etc. Like we saw recently that US carriers have been selling people's location data to bounty hunters and all sorts of other shady groups -- all in the name of some extra profit. No, I definitely think a strong law against such abuses would be much better than it not existing.
But in an ideal world, the governments would've prevented the unethical behavior way before it starts giving companies billions of dollars in profit every single quarter. And then both the rampant abuses for a decade+ and the monopolies would be prevented from the start.
I've been kind of developing my own "rule of thumb" for noticing which company is a monopoly/makes too much money in some unethical way. When a company reaches this step you start seeing it "invest" into all sorts of crazy and unrelated ideas and markets that have nothing to do with its core business.
When a company has "too much money it doesn't know what to do with" and prefers spending it on completely unrelated markets instead of improving its core products/offering better value (huge red flag if it doesn't here), then you know that company is doing something that makes it way too easy for it to print money. Maybe it's lobbying Congress for locking out competitors, maybe it's it bribing government officials to gain contracts, maybe it's them coercing customers into exclusive deals, and so on. When it gets too easy to make a lot of money and the competition seems to have no way of catching up, it's not just because the product is that good.