Isn't the only way to fix the competition problem more administrative grey goo? I have worked in this industry. There is a nice history of buying up all competitors... Especially when the competitors used to be parts of you.
Did you forget the governments attempt to break up AT&T already?
Right, ditto with AT&T. That's the point. Monopolies haven't always been able to resist being broken up -- but they have always been able to arrange the breakup so that the pieces don't compete and don't shift bargaining power to the consumer.
Your argument is exactly the problem. The fragmentation is what would happen, and the consumers suffer from it rather than benefit from it. This has been proven over and over again by history. When AT&T was broken up, there were like a hundred smaller players, incompatible with each other, and everyone has to pay extra cost to communicate with each other. It is a backward step for the society. The consumers benefit from nothing. Don't just assume more smaller companies means better competition and better for the consumers. It is not necessarily true.
These are all problems, I'm just happy that there's an appetite for anti-trust action at all at the federal level. Let's also not forget that phone service providers already had a round of anti-trust back in 1982[1], though it seems like legislators have forgotten why that occurred and let many of the baby Bells re-merge in recent years.
The logic there is astounding. The government broke up AT&T into a bunch of little companies. These companies then merged their way back into a handful of large corporations and are still trying to merge even more. Did the government force them to join up together? Of course not. The government is actively discouraging a lot of these mergers, i.e. the government is forcing there to be a more competitive marketplace.
ATT is still pretty broken up. Its components turned into Verizon, QWest and ATT. The vertical integration (every US telecom device before the breakup was physically manufactured by an ATT subsidiary) is gone.
Meanwhile, I don't see how having more than 3 companies building cellular infrastructure helps at all. Regulated access for MVNOs seems to fill the competition niche.
I don't think breaking up AT&T was a success story. Instead of a national monopoly, you got regional ones and a long-distance provider. It was all still very over-pried and silly. The situation didn't improve for consumers until cell phone plans got close to the price of landlines.
A breakup is highly unlikely IMO. Not only has the U.S. govt not been keen to break up monopolies in the last ~30 years, but it actually let AT&T reconstitute itself by re-acquiring most (all?) of the former baby Bells ~20 years after breaking them up.
In addition, the current administration has taken an absolutely anti-regulation approach if you get/stay in their good graces. I suspect that something closer to a toothless consent decree with certain <cough> accommodations to the administration would make this all go away. Not saying it's right, just that it seems the most likely.
Remember when ma bell was split up? Now there's a strong distaste for breaking up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit... - The FTC seems to prefer to prevent monopolies by considering and blocking acquisitions... but this clearly has blind spots.
Like all economic systems, a strong and independent state/gov't is required to force-fix issues that don't make financial sense to fix (ex. FDA creation after The Jungle). I think our current system is suffering from regulatory capture, and I don't see a way to resolve this kind of near-corruption. Corporatism will continue until the system is no longer sustainable, which likely will never happen (within our lifetimes).
I have my doubts we will ever see a monopoly broken up again. Mainly I attribute that to the lobbying power of all monopolies. If Company A is getting investigated, it is in the interest of Companies B through Z to not have Company A broken up lest it gives the gov't the idea to come after them next.
Also, what's the point of the break up? Look at how AT&T was broken into the Baby Bells. After a number of years, ATT formed from merging all of the Baby Bells back into the same company again (minus the ampersand).
Right, telecom is a great example of where breaking up an entity benefited the consumer and prevented monopoly. /s (all the bells merged back in some form or another into present day AT&T and Verizon).
As much as people like to talk up the AT&T breakup, it wasn't all that effective because it just created regional monopolies with the silly local/long distance split.
Splitting up network companies and retailers might have been more interesting, but there's still the issue of having a monopoly on the last mile of copper.
Breaking up AT&T led to phenomenal innovation and growth. We've gone from not being able to own things like phones (had to lease them from AT&T) and not being able to use telephone answering systems (not invented by AT&T, so not AT&T equipment, so not allowed on the network), to where we are today.
But one of the costs was to make it easier for that growth to bypass large parts of the US. The baby Bells like Frontier that were in less desirable regions no longer share in the wealth generated by the ones like Verizon.
I remember there was a chart online show how at&t was broken up by the government for being a monopoly and then showing the parts slowly reconstituting themselves back together
At&t needs to be broken up by region again. Along with Monsanto, Walmart, Comcast, Verizon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
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