Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook
The problem with these types of articles is that it doesn&#x27;t contain a single actionable step on how one would go about breaking up these monopolies. It&#x27;s a lot of &quot;well, we did it with the electrical providers and telephone providers so we should do it with google.&quot;<p>Well, you can take a national utility and split it across geographic regions so local calls or electricity bills go into the pockets of the region you are in, and calls between two regions go into the pockets of both according to whatever long distance agreement is in place. That&#x27;s at least workable. Or you break up an Oil Company that has 500 wells&#x2F;concessions, into 5 groups of 100 wells&#x2F;concessions. Or a railroad with a nationwide network, split up into 5 regional networks. That could work, too. That&#x27;s what we did in the past to break up monopolies.<p>Now how would that work with google search? Prevent people in region A from loading a website in region B? Is that what we want? <i>crickets</i><p>Sure there is low hanging fruit in terms of divesting -- e.g. no reason to keep a video monopoly like youtube with a search monopoly. I&#x27;m all for it. But now you just have two monopolies, and have not solved the problem of lack of competition in either video or search, which is ostensibly what you use to justfy these actions.<p>In fact the consumer pains with long distance in the wake of the ATT breakup is the reason why the law has changed on anti-trust. Now you must show consumer harm to pass constitutional muster and your proposal has to show consumer benefit.  A proposal to break off youtube from google is going to have a hard time passing this test.<p>So yes, we, get it, we solved the problem of anti-trusts in the past, we don&#x27;t like google, so We Must Do Something. Except those old anti-trust strategies just wont work against monopolies that have no geographic dimension. That no one is willing to touch that explains why we have a deluge of pleas, none of which contain a single workable proposal.