In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians? https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Mark Boost, CEO of UK-based cloud company Civo is similarly disappointed in the outcome.Boost said the deal is "not good news" for the cloud industry, and added several important questions still need to be answered."We need to know more about how the process of compensation will work," he said. "Will all cloud providers in Europe be compensated, or just CISPE members? Is this a process that will be arbitrated by Microsoft? Where are the regulators in this?"Boost added that the deal will benefit CISPE members only in the short term, but that the cloud industry and its customers will pay the price in the long-term.

Google has argued that switching search engines is just a click away and that people use Google because it's the superior search engine. Google also argued at trial that Microsoft's failures with Bing are "a direct result of Microsoft’s missteps in Internet search."

BlackRock employs a stable of former policymakers, underscoring the importance the company occupies in both financial and policymaking ecosystems, in something akin to a shadow government entity.[157] Good government groups have documented 118 examples of “revolving door” activity by the company—cases in which a government official joined BlackRock’s roster, or vice versa.[158] In one particularly troubling example of how Washington’s revolving door operates, in 2017, a former BlackRock executive was put in charge of reviewing the FSOC’s work for the Treasury Department.[159] Unsurprisingly, the Department’s conclusion was that FSOC should “prioritize its efforts to address risks to financial stability through a process that emphasizes an activities-based or industry-wide approach,” the company’s preferred position.[160] This conclusion all but ensures that BlackRock will not be designated for greater regulation by the FSOC under the Trump administration.

The idea is that many smaller tech companies would allow for more choice between services. This solution is flawed. For one, services like search or social media benefit from network effects. Having large datasets to train on, means search recommendations get better. Having all your friends in one place, means you don’t need five apps to contact them all. I would argue those are all things we like and might lose when Big Tech is broken up. What we want is to be able to leave Facebook and still talk to our friends, instead of having many Facebooks.

Monopolies, Bork believed, were generally good, as long as they delivered low prices. A monopoly would only persist if it were more efficient than its competitors.

If there were a company making super-charged monopoly profits, bankers would naturally invest in a competitor, thus addressing the monopoly problem without government intervention.

As John Sherman, the senator who gave his name to America’s original antitrust law in 1890, put it at a time when the robber barons ruled much of America’s economy: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessaries of life.”

Clayton Act