Cobalt, it used to be illegal for melanin-rich people to sit on the front of buses or attend school. I recall Governor Wallace, I believe it was, who stood in the doorway of a school to block a girl from attending. Laws are based on power, not brains or morals. It used to be illegal for women to have abortions. Then the Supreme Court declared a change in point of view and it's okay.
Now it's illegal to operate a monopoly. Any transaction whatsoever, with or without government copyright or patent protection, licence or other protection, is a transient monopoly.
Where there are 4 gas stations on the four corners of an intersection, monopolies abound! One is the only one on the NW corner. Another is the only one with a particular kind of nozzle. Another has the only Texaco brand. Another has a more attractive canopy. One might be the only one with R+M/2 = 99 octane.
Should an anti-trust case be brought against the gas station which charges more because a particular customer or group of customers want 99 octane but they object to the higher price?
The Sherman Antitrust Act is nonsense.
Recall that it was directed at 'trusts'. These trusts do not exist now. So it morphed into anti-monopoly.
Great care is needed to define monopolies very closely or suddenly competitors will appear at every juncture, just as in the gas-station analogy. A bus might even come along and make ALL of the gas-stations irrelevant. A fibre connection might replace the gas-stations so people have no need to move to where they were going. Competition appears in many forms.
The definition of Microsoft's monopoly had to exclude many competitors to Microsoft or the case would fail. So they homed in on browsers and operating systems for a particular kind of ASIC. Even in that very narrow definition, there was no monopoly. Oh, yes, we define a monopoly to be a market share over maybe 50% or 70% in the very narrow category described.
It's absurd.
Sherman Act and 'antitrust' laws are act of hostile atavism based on cargo-cult mentality.
This is what GG thinks!
Mqurice
PS: Lucy Lawless [Xena] actually used the phrase 'an act of hostile atavism' [rechecking memory]. She also talked about using 'big words' [because the word atavism made people reach for their dictionaries]. Read it here:
xenamedia.com
<...And "atavism"? It's something she loves about English. "There's a word for absolutely everything, and if a word exists you can use it. Don't let everything fall into disuse."... >
Cargo-cult here:
encyclopedia.com |
