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Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 13:28:21 :
In Reply to: WOW! posted by Ugg, North of Chi-Town on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 07:05:43 :
Once upon a time in this country we had a law, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (I like the name), which banned monopolies. No one company was allowed to control the majority of any given market for any product. It was enforced regularly up through the 1960s, but now it seems to be completely ignored. How many competing credit card companies are there (and no, Visa and MC are not really separate companies)? What share of the market does the largest maker of computer operating systems control? How about the largest on-line auction service? There seems to be an unspoken rule in the Justice Department that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act only applies to industries that were in existence in Sherman's day, like coal and steel, not to anything high-tech or computerized. The government ought to go to these high-tech monopolies and say, "Look, you and I both know that you control 90+ percent of this market. That's illegal. Either you open up your database (or source code, or whatever) for competition, or we regulate you as a monopoly like you were a utility company." I'm a big believe in capitalism, but capitalism is only good for the customers when there's active competition.
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