How do conglomerate corporations avoid anti-trust breakups in the US?
In: 1
Anti-trust laws are primarily in place to avoid monopolies, but especially in the tech industry this has become a grey area.
The key is not acting like a monopoly to control pricing and pushing out the competition.
ISPs for example will sometimes have a local monopoly but claim they have competition in the market because there is a different cable company in the town next door even though a particular customer doesn’t have access to them.
Having competition in a completely different region still means you have a monopoly in an area but the government doesn’t see it that way.
Tech giants like Microsoft have functional monopolies on software due to the popularity of their products but have enough minor competition to avoid further antitrust lawsuits.
The common excuse being: “our primary competitor is open source and therefore free, how do we compete with that?”
Microsoft actually invested in Apple at one point to help keep them afloat, probably to help keep their key and at the time minor competitor alive.
Latest Answers