> And yet, cartels and illegal price fixing occurred pretty often in history. There's a lot of research that's gone into this. Cartels (specifically multipart

> And yet, cartels and illegal price fixing occurred pretty often in history. There's a lot of research that's gone into this. Cartels (specifically multiparty cartels organized around price fixing) have rarely been stable for extended periods of time. The exceptions are usually either (1) Domestic cartels which are able to gain the backing of the (nation-state) government that has jurisdiction over them (2) Cartels which are able to find a separate motivation shared by all parties to justify the collusion The first case is obviously not applicable to what we're talking about here. The second is what I already mentioned, and it's pretty rare (and not applicable to this situation either).