> It is a lazy dodge around the traditional responsibility of regulators to identify and regulate actual anti-competitive behavior when it actually happens
Traditional since the ‘70s, when Chicago school jackasses got their way and all but destroyed antitrust enforcement, in practice.
A shift back would be great. Let’s get a little more traditional.
We’ve seen this TV show before, but nobody paid attention. The magnificent 7 are essentially the ITT/LTV/Litton of the 1960s reborn. GE is the other one of more recent memory.
Massive diversified entities get bureaucratic, unwieldy and ineffective over time.
But some short hand:
-Assumes vertical integration is necessarily abusive
-Assumes lowering price is necessarily a setup for anti-competitive practices. This one’s particularly ironic because lowering prices is definitely a first-order good for consumers and businesses that buy those goods. Bezos’ famous saying was “your margin is my opportunity” —- would you rather the standard continue to be massive retailer markup profit that goes straight to retail corps?
-Vague scare tactic claims that expanding into media production etc will somehow (yadda yadda, Step 2: ???) lead to monopolies in every category they enter.
The TLDR of the problem with Neobrandeis is it forms a very opinionated paranoid notion that size can only lead to bad things and no good things. It is a lazy dodge around the traditional responsibility of regulators to identify and regulate actual anti-competitive behavior when it actually happens By constraining companies from using any form of size or integration-related advantage, it lowers the pressure to actually be competitive and innovative for everyone else. I’m not saying everything should be unconditionally allowed, there’s a balance to strike. But when you just have a blunt “anti-size” hammer, you’re gonna do collateral damage to a healthy competitive ecosystem in a damaging way.