He was mostly talking of for-pay goods and services. The current trend of offering "free" services, that are anything but, is severely distorting the market. It

He was mostly talking of for-pay goods and services. The current trend of offering "free" services, that are anything but, is severely distorting the market. It's exploiting a current gap in consumer knowledge where people are massively undervaluing the literal value of their private information. But in a normal pay-to-play business, the argument is self evident. Either the monopolizer is malicious or benevolent. If they're benevolent then a monopoly doesn't matter. If they're malicious then that means that they're exploiting their market positioning to artificially inflate the prices of their goods/services. When a company has unreasonably high prices this enables competitors to come in and gain marketshare easily by offering lower prices. And you're definitely right that the company can do things like try to buy out the smaller company, perhaps put pressure on their suppliers, etc. But this is a never ending game since for instance the smaller competitor could then even begin to develop their own supply chain, etc. And a small company getting bought out for some fat paycheck before they even really hit their stride is hardly discouraging to other would-be competitors! So long as the pie and the end of the tunnel is large enough, there will be an incentive to compete against the monopoly. There is also the innovation issue. Coercive monopolies do not often innovate. Their focus is on profit whereas innovation tends to be focused on competition. This lack of innovation once again offers a big gap in the market for competitors. The aerospace industry vs SpaceX are the best example here. Boeing/Lockheed had a partially government enforced coercive monopoly in a field with greater barriers to entry than practically any 'material' industry. Yet a guy with 'nothing' but a few hundred million and the understanding that something worth on the order of let's say $20 million of material costs should not cost $500 million to build and launch, was able to enter the field and rapidly rise to dominance by working on nothing but innovation and non-monopolistic prices. Boeing/Lockheed by contrast were still so stuck in the past with their MBA style executive leadership that now, many years after the 'threat' of SpaceX has become self evident, that they've still been unable to effectively react. So to avoid retro-fitting the past to fit a narrative, I expect in the future we'll be able to spin an exact tale of the telecoms industry. Once again another [heavily government enabled] monopoly that's completely failed to innovate and charges unreasonably high prices. Something like the proposed SpaceX constellation of LEO satellites for the purpose of low-cost high-stability internet stands to leave them completely taking over that industry. Of course the failure of Google fiber is an argument to the contrary, but that gets into an entirely different tangent and I think there were many reasons for that failure that lay squarely with Google.