> The question is whether it is actually illegal under the law... This has become a painfully, utterly common trope on Hacker News. The Sherman Anti-Trust act

> The question is whether it is actually illegal under the law... This has become a painfully, utterly common trope on Hacker News. The Sherman Anti-Trust act is one paragraph long. It doesn't attract the same spirited interest from judges as the constitutional amendments do, which are even shorter. Judges and Justices have been writing the law on those for a long, long time, including reversing their own precedents, "ignoring" case law - really just fucking disagreeing with the past. To hell with case law. > underlying behavior seems really objectionable and should be illegal This is what matters. At the end of the day, if the government wants to win these cases, it's not going to be by making RealPage look bad - one kind of tomfoolery - or by stare decisis - another kind of tomfoolery. Judges and Justices are writing anti-trust law. So give them some good fucking propaganda. Make them give a single utter fuck about something as utterly god damned dull as this. Align it with their political opinions, because that is what decides these cases. The same thing is true about the Google case. The FTC doesn't even care about advertising. The DoJ doesn't care about apartment pricing. The underlying problem is that the people litigating this have no passion about the thing whatsoever, they are way too big picture "company bad" and don't have much else to go on.