[andbberger]

You've got it backwards, and I find that way of thinking quite dangerous.

You have to go to the root of the problem to solve it, and the root is that corps are fundamentally driven towards monopolistic practices by competition. If it's legal, and it improves the bottom line corps __have__ to do it. Not should or will, __have__ to. Because if they don't someone else will and they'll die.

Need to treat corps like the organisms that they are. More than the sum of their parts, and with their own agency.

[turc1656]

Agree with you on your main point, but the conclusion you draw is strange. Yes, they are driven towards monopolistic practices and if something is legal, it will be done. Totally agree. But that's precisely why Title 15 exists. The government/society sets the rules of what is deemed acceptable and allowed to be done in pursuit of profit. If you violate those rules - rules which everyone else follows and is expected to follow, you have committed a serious offense according to the law. Why would/should that not result in prosecution? Because it's an "organism" that acts as a separate entity from a regular person? Fine, Title 15 allows for the prosecution of the entity itself so you can charge the entity but it also includes the ability to charge the individuals within the entity that acted in violation of the law". Make no mistake, in basically every one of these examples I have ever seen, there is most definitely a person or group of people that discussed the company's action/policy and decided to break the law. You think the decision at Google to promote their own products and put competitors on page 4 just magically happened? No. A person (i.e. product manager) or a group of people sat in a room and discussed how to increase profits and actively made that decision. They deserve to be individually charged for their actions and the company should be charged because they were all acting on behalf of the firm. The lawyers for these companies aren't stupid. But they know these laws are not being enforced...from the article: "Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws." That quote from the article was in reference to challenging the mergers, but the same larger body of law includes Title 15. And if they aren't even challenging these mergers properly, you know for damn sure they aren't enforcing the rest of Title 15 properly because that takes much more work on their part. These laws exist for a very, very good reason. As soon as you start strongly enforcing these laws, this problem will go away. These aren't obscure laws we're talking about. These are part of the bedrock of our laws regarding competition and fair practices.

EDIT: It is precisely because the rule of law barely exists regarding Title 15 for certain companies that we have this problem. The issue isn't that we are approaching the problem incorrectly - it's that this is a consequence of lawlessness and a lack of enforcement. All the tools to properly address this exist already and don't really require adjustment, just enforcement.