Right. It's not as ambiguous as people think it is, and that is what will likely disappoint a lot of people who think we can use it to reign in tech companies.

Right. It's not as ambiguous as people think it is, and that is what will likely disappoint a lot of people who think we can use it to reign in tech companies. It's actually been decided over the decades that some pretty specific things need to happen for an entity to warrant a breakup. For instance, Microsoft, was not broken up. AT&T was. There were actually some very specific reasons that this was the case. Contrary to popular belief at the time, it was not because Microsoft paid off the government. By way of illustration using cases from anotheer era, I think Standard Oil and American Tobacco were broken up on the same day. The reasons behind Standard Oil are obvious so we don't need to go into that case, but American Tobacco is the interesting one. They thought they would get away with what they were doing because, in their minds, they were no different than the American Sugar Refining trust. They didn't control growing the tobacco, and they didn't control retail of the tobacco. Here's the thing though, they did control manufacturing of the products. ALL tobacco products. So you could grow tobacco, but there really was only one entity to which you could sell your crops. Ditto for retail of tobacco. You could only get products from one source. The court laughed off the United States v. E. C. Knight Company case because American Sugar did not control growing of sugar, or retailing of sugar, and they didn't even control all the making of sugar. So in reality, American Tobacco was something entirely different than American Sugar. The principals at American Tobacco had definitely miscalculated in this regard. (Incidentally, by around 1920 (I think?), American Sugar could be shown to control Cuba's plantations, all refining of sugar, etc etc, and I believe? they were broken up too? Or maybe not broken up, but there were some sanctions for them? I don't remember it all it's been a while since law school. Anyway, you can google it if you want more info.) Point is, you can't just have a successful company like Microsoft and claim that they have a monopoly. There's actually a lot more moving parts. It's why Microsoft walked out of court with a slap on the wrist. It's why American Sugar didn't even get a slap on the wrist in 1895, but the court had a good belly laugh. And it's why AT&T and American Tobacco got broken up as a result of their indictments.