With existence of antitrust laws, or government regulations in general, it's not really a free market. Both IBM and Microsoft were hit with antitrust issues. St

With existence of antitrust laws, or government regulations in general, it's not really a free market. Both IBM and Microsoft were hit with antitrust issues. Standard Oil or even AT&T are some examples that come to mind. I bet there are countless other examples where consolidation was either prohibited by regulators, or not even attempted in the first place due to antitrust issues. E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust.2C_the_Unbundling_of_software_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM#1969:_Antitrust... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCR_Corporation#Expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCR_Corporation#Expansion