EU courts have arrived at similar conclusions re: Adwords. Specifically, they found that adwords does this sort of thing to its "search partners," competitors t

EU courts have arrived at similar conclusions re: Adwords. Specifically, they found that adwords does this sort of thing to its "search partners," competitors to google monetising via Adwords. Google fought it, lost it, and then took its puny (in google terms) $1.5bn fine as a (affordable) cost of doing business. They certainly would have be happy to pay more than this for the gains they made by operating this way. The issue with Antitrust as it is, is that the "crime" requires active proof and specificity. Essentially, the (practically) inevitable side effects of market dominance. You might need to prove specific violations like price fixing or (like with Adwords, Amazon and other current cases) using market data to gain an edge as a participant. You might need to prove market dominance by "proving" price effects and other microeconomic effects. The problem is, these are hard to prove. You certainly can't prove all of them. But, they are a problem to the extent that monopolies exist. An occasional, multi year case ending in a fine <5% of annual revenue... this is a farce. Antitrust law is having almost no effects. It doesn't help that software economics are very different, and that a lot of both theory and legislation practically assumes that the "market" is commodity-like. It just so happens that dominating literal "marketplaces" like adwords, amazon marketplace, etc. is an area with precedents. Meanwhile, it's not like we particularly care if the adwords marketplace is efficient. There is simultaneously a massive public interest in 2020 monopolies, ooh. Otoh, the cases that prosecutors are making are very disconnected from the actual public interest. The public isn't all that interested in ad marketplaces being "better," cheaper or whatnot.