[crazygringo]

I understand your frustration, but it's genuinely not that easy.

You're right that there are a lot of gray areas in the law, where the two sides are clear but there's a blurry line. One famous example being, should Pringles be taxed as potato chips or as other chips? Because they're not fried slices of potatoes, they're a fried and shaped mixture of dried potatoes, corn flour, and rice flour. People think of them as potato chips, but they're not really. But it's still relatively straightforward to just draw a line somewhere.

The problem with antitrust is that we don't really know how to define it at all. It's not just a single dimension like "is it a potato chip?" where there's just a single line. It's more like a blob with lots of dimensions where different reasonable completely just completely disagree on what the basic most important elements even are.

> Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing

That's where you're wrong. Badly applied antitrust law can actually be much worse than doing nothing.

I'm not saying to give up. I'm just saying, it's not nearly as easy as you're making it sound. There are really smart people who research antitrust and try to come up with recommendations, and they have profound disagreements with each other. The problem is actually a lot harder than you seem to think it is.