[_heimdall]

At least in the US, I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work and that the government realized its easier to regulate the consumer than to deal with regulating massive corporations.

If you want to win reelection you're much better off taking massive piles of cash from big businesses and regulate consumers to help create the monopolies. Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.

[dotnet00]

In the US we've proven that it's easiest to just talk about anti-competition regulation to buy votes and then never actually get around to improving or enforcing it. After all, if you solve problems, you lose platforms to run the next election on.

[teaearlgraycold]

I don’t think that last sentence follows. There are always more problems to solve. They’re just stupid and lazy and loyal to their owners.

[dotnet00]

There are always more problems, but for example, it's a lot easier to get voters heated over abortion rights than it is over whether or not a national ID should carry biometric data.

[_heimdall]

I'd argue there are always more problems, we don't have to solve them all nor should we assume that we can.

[nicoburns]

> I believe we've proven that anti-competition regulations don't work

You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.

> Trying to protect consumers by breaking up monopolies and promoting healthy market competition will see you leaving office in a hurry.

That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.

[mistrial9]

I agree with the sentiment here but..

> You barely have any .. anti-competition regulations

this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..

There are very large enforcement actions that take place regularly.. they are far from perfect, and the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..

[AnthonyMouse]

> this is not true. However, the secrecy implemented around enforcement (bad publicity) causes the casual observer to think so..

That isn't the reason it isn't true. The US nominally has quite strong antitrust laws. The statutes are extremely broad in what they prohibit. But the enforcement is lacking and the courts over time have read the laws more narrowly than they were intended to be.

> the failures tend to be the ones that are amplified in media..

The failures are prolific. In a functioning regulatory environment, whether because you don't have regulations that prop up incumbents and don't create regulatory barriers to entry or because you break them up and stop them from buying each other, you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market. But that is common, not rare, and that is the measure of it working.

[feetsoup]

>In a functioning regulatory environment [...] you wouldn't have industries where any one company has more than 15% of the market.

Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised

[AnthonyMouse]

> Is that realistic? Intuition is telling me that's very idealistic but I'm prepared to be surprised

There are many markets where this is the case. Which trucking company has significantly more than 15% market share? Which law firm? Which car insurance company? Which university? Which construction company?

Nearly all of the consolidated industries got there through some combination of mergers, vertical integration and regulatory barriers to entry. Even some of the "natural monopolies" like last mile telecommunications are only so because of regulatory choices -- the natural monopoly is actually the roads, which the government owns, and if they provided easy and affordable access to roadside cable trenches there would be much more competition for data service.

[_heimdall]

> You have? How? You barely have any. And the ones you do have you rarely enforce.

Lack of enforcement was actually part of my point. More broadly, though, we don't need more regulation so much as we need less legal protections that allow companies to get away with it.

> That sounds like a flaw in your political/electoral system not in anti-competition regulations.

No disagreements at all that our political and electoral system is flawed. I'm not so sure if that's the direct cause here though or if its the other way around. Meaning, we could be here because runaway anticompetitive behavior led to political and regulatory capture rather than the flawed political system being the proximal cause.

[bratbag]

I think you are missing the third leg of this, which is how those monopolies extend outside of the US and act as part of the states global soft power strategy in those other countries where they are also monopolies.

The US is no more likely to break them up as it is to cut its military budget in half.

[voisin]

Comrade, if you think the US is bad you should come check out Canada.