Regulating them ultimately doesn't work very well because a.) it's reactive rather than proactive, so there's regulatory lag b.) it injects politics, and politi

Regulating them ultimately doesn't work very well because a.) it's reactive rather than proactive, so there's regulatory lag b.) it injects politics, and political wind c.) because of a and b we get inconsistency, changes in policy, this isn't good for either consumers or employees or investors. I'm not sure what the work around is, but for sure we (Americans) do not apply anti-trust / competition law as aggressively as we should. It just seems wrong to me to allow these big companies to buy up smaller companies and then just obliterate them into nothing, not use their technologies, just destroy them by putting the patents into a vault and sue anyone who infringes but not letting anyone benefit either. They all do this to varying degrees. It's like at a certain market value as a percentage of either global or maybe national wealth, companies should be disallowed from mergers of any kind. And at another level of size, they are required to break themselves up into pieces. Edit: Maybe disallow hoarding patents. If after X years you're not using a patent, it either auto-expires and is relegated to public domain, or it's compulsory to sell it. Use it or lose it!