[LurkingPenguin]

I don't think the quote is very meaningful.

> A small business can generally be as anticompetitive as it wants to be...

The whole point of anticompetitive behavior is to reduce competition in the market. A "small business" generally doesn't have the ability to do this at any meaningful level even if it engages in behavior that would reduce competition if it was instead a huge business.

For instance, if a small business decides to sell some products at a loss ("dumping"), it won't meaningfully drive competitors out of the market. Therefore it would be silly to characterize this behavior as anticompetitive.

Put simply, you are anticompetitive when you actually have the ability to meaningfully reduce competition in the market. If you go down the list of behaviors that are typically considered anticompetitive, almost none of them would be employed by small businesses in an effort to reduce competition anyway.

[villasv]

You just explained the meaning of the “meaningless” quote. Thanks, I guess.

[LurkingPenguin]

It's meaningless because the supposedly "anticompetitive" behavior isn't "anticompetitive" at all when engaged in by a small business.

[xboxnolifes]

It's not meaningless because the behavior itself didn't change, only the scale. You can have one business that never changes their business strategy, but once they get too big suddenly they are anticompetitive without having actually changed their behavior.

This either says that either one believes behavior itself can never be anti-competitive (since it relies on scale as input), or that one must always take into account scale in the discussion. In which case, a lot of anticompetitive discussions need to add in a lot more qualifying context.