No factual evidence to support claims that many markets are becoming dominated by near-monopolies

Antitrust for Fun and Profit: The Democrats’ Better Deal (Part 3). Excerpt:

"This continues Part 1 and Part 2 of my critique of the arguments for aggressive antitrust activism offered in Steven Pearlstein’s Washington Post article, “Is Amazon Getting Too Big,” which is largely based on a loquacious law review article by Lina Kahn of the Google-funded “New America” think tank.

My previous blogs found no factual evidence to support claims of Pearlstein and Kahn that many markets (which must include imported goods and services) are becoming dominated by near-monopolies who profit from overcharging and under-serving consumers.

Yet the wordiest Kahn-Pearlstein arguments for more antitrust suits against large tech companies are not about facts at all, but about theories and predictions.

Kahn makes a plea for preemptive punishment based on omniscient futurism. “The current market is not always a good indication of competitive harm,” she writes.  Antitrust enforcers “have to ask what the future market will look like.” But how could antitrust enforcers’ predictions about what might or might not happen in the future be deemed a crime or a cause for civil damages?  If the law allowed courts to levy huge fines or break-up companies on the basis of prosecutors’ predictions of the future, the potential for whimsical damages and political corruption would be almost limitless.

We have already experienced extremely costly federal (and European) antitrust cases based largely on incredible predictions about “what the future market will look like” – mostly obviously in the cases against IBM and Microsoft.

IBM was the subject of 13 years of antitrust “investigation” (harassment) before the suit was finally dismissed “without merit” in 1982.  My first article about antitrust was a 1974 critique of the IBM case in Reason magazine which remains the best explanation (aside from this book) of what I mean about antitrust being “for fun and profit.”

Pearlstein imagines “it was the government’s aborted prosecution of IBM … that made Microsoft possible.”  But IBM’s decision to offer three operating systems for the PC and allow Microsoft to sell MS-DOS to Compaq had nothing to do with the government’s antitrust crusade against IBM.  That crusade was a well-funded project of Control Data, Honeywell, NCR and Sperry Rand – competitors of IBM’s who hoped to do better in court than they had with customers."