That’s kind of the fundamental issue with antitrust law. By the time you’re in court, the case is already pretty much irrelevant to the addressable market the p

That’s kind of the fundamental issue with antitrust law. By the time you’re in court, the case is already pretty much irrelevant to the addressable market the prosecution is representing. The fear is that someone will dominate a market so thoroughly that they will never have any real competition from an alternative. When you were talking about railroad rights of way and maybe a finite number of salt mines, I mean, fair enough. But now we fly over those rights of way and finding new places to get mineral resources is generally not that difficult because we either find new physical locations or we develop new technologies to re-exploit sites that were thought to be tapped out (and technically were with just older technology). Plus with electrification we’ve figured out new ways to get large quantities of energy other than drilling for oil. How do you even define a market for search, when what people were really after was what search engines could get them and there are more ways than ever to get that now?