>how do you maintain an adversarial proceeding?
It's the government as a prosecutor. If current teams are compromised, they find a different team.
This isn't like some law firm with an interest to keep their own lights on. A government prosecution against a threat to labor and economic markets should be to close whatever loopholes lead up to this point.
>The reality is that the current social class of lawyers and judges hate antitrust. They successfully recast it from an argument about market power to an argument about price controls, and well, most monopolies don't actually raise prices[0], so building a case against them is very difficult.
Sounds like a compromised DoJ in that case. Which is definitely the case in the modern day.
But the monopoly argument doesn't hold weight. Some aspects of life are best run as monopolies. But such businesses are highly, highly regulated to prevent the downsides of unbridled capitalism. Big tech is not regulated at all in terms of pricings. And thus we're seeing the results of that in real time.
>While courts are ostensibly neutral arbiters of law, they bend to the fiscal interests of the nation and are inherently political entities, because courts have no inherent power but what they are given by the state.
Sounds like a fancy way to say "big companies always bribed the courts". It's in economic best interest to have a free flow of competition. But it's in individuals' best interests to have good relationships with the biggest winners. The claim of 'interests of the nation' contradicts the fact that being soft on anti-trust betrays such interests.