The worst possible antitrust outcome

>What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.

> You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself.

If that's what it means, I don't think it makes sense, because the point of taking away the money was to reduce the ability of the rich to unduly control and influence others. If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.

I basically agree with the post and it's similar to what I was saying in comments on another post a few days ago. Trying to impose piecemeal conditions on monopolists is more trouble than it's worth. They should just be forcibly dismantled.

There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.

We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).

What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.

The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.

Are you're saying nominal tax rates have no correlation to effective tax rates? (Also, I am in favor of closing tax loopholes.)

Basically it should be illegal per se but since the 70's the Court has really limited how they apply that and so courts generally prefer to do a competitive analysis/quick look first. In this case, the argument might be that since the cost to consumer doesn't increase, it isn't a naked price fix so it's not per se illegal.

As I learned it, since BMI & ASCAP v. CBS, in 1979, it's essentially been that the per se rule is applied when the courts have enough experience with an accused restraint to know that it is so plainly anticompetitive, and so often lacks any redeeming virtue, that further inquiry in any given case is almost certainly wasted effort

Bork and his acolytes really screwed us, basically, turning a half-baked understanding of economics into a justification to ignore legislation and 60+ years of jurisprudence, and that's carried the day since.

> You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.

As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.

The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.

I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.