How do conglomerate corporations avoid anti-trust breakups in the US?
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There’s nothing inherently illegal about being a big conglomerate corporate, or being a trust…it’s how they behave that matters. Specifically, are they using their dominant market position to reduce competition.
Even a monster conglomerate like pre-breakup GE has plenty of competition in every business they operate in. As long as they don’t have enough market power to unfairly influence competition, they’re. At least with respect to anti-trust law.
Now that anti-trust law is a thing, large mergers have to go through government review and approval. It’s very hard to create a conglomerate with an over dominant market position now because the merger will get rejected. This happens fairly often, or they’ll allow the merger to proceed but force the conglomerate to spin off some portion to maintain competition.
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