Funny you should bring up that era, because if we're not there again, we're headed that way. Economic and political power are once again getting concentrated on few powerful corporate entities. The MS decision, misguided or not, is a turning point toward putting the good of large corporations ahead of the good of independent startups and mom & pop's.
You're probably right about that, but they're basically incomparable. Not just because there are are pre-existing checks in place, but also because of the difference in sectors of growth and conglomeration, as well as a completely different global economic environment. Needless to say,
illegal anti-competitive tactics aren't really the main thing keeping these independent startups and mom & pops out of most of the sectors we're talking about when we refer to companies like Microsoft, and really that's what anti-trust laws are designed to do: protect the consumer and competition from rigidly unfair and illegally competitive abuses of a monopolistic position.
The problem is that what constitutes an illegal anti-competitive practice is generally pretty clearly defined. Predatory pricing, dumping (interestingly enough, Nintendo was found guilty of this in the EU fairly recently although they may have got off on appeal), tying, limit pricing, and interestingly enough territory dividing between large firms. Those are all illegal anti-competitive tactics that go a long way to proving that any given monopoly is a coercive monopoly - and that's key because that's the only kind of monopoly that anti-trust laws were designed to regulate. Success is not illegal, advantage by economy of scale is not illegal, and integration itself is not illegal.
The problem with the Microsoft anti-trust suit is that it was handled poorly. Few critics of the suit will actually argue that Microsoft was not a coercive monopoly, but rather that the anti-trust laws should have been amended before hand to not only provide a stronger case against Microsoft, but also to set new guidelines and clearly defined rules for a completely new age of business. Applying the previously existing laws only leads to trouble as they don't really fit the times correctly. Competition is different, and we're talking about a completely different business entity than anything that had ever had a major anti-trust suit leveled against it. The criticism isn't there because people think Microsoft was being perfectly competitive, the criticism is there because the rules don't really make all that much sense anymore when you look at the whole picture and thus need to be redefined. The problem here is what to redefine it to, and how to ensure that anti-trust laws are applied equally and fairly.
Even a staunch conservative will agree that one of the legitimate functions of government in a capitalistic society is to break up monopolies. A monopoly is by nature anticompetitive, and competition is the motive force of capitalism.
While that's mostly true, many political economists have started to take the hyper-liberal route, essentially calling for governments to ensure that markets be competitively organized rather than regulated. That's competitive on a global scale, not really competitive within your industry on a national level (essentially it works out that inter-industry competition should be promoted, except in instances where global competition is a serious competitor). This is essentially in response to a global economic environment where large corporations have no national ties beyond a symbolic level, and it's within their best interests to pull up anchor and settle down in the environment most willing to accommodate them. IF governments want to try to keep GNP at first world levels and ensure a desirable standard of living (as well as full or near-full employment), micromanaging of the economy and hard regulation of industry is most likely going to have to step out of the way as countries compete for job markets in the high-technology sector in order to avoid relying on somewhat dangerous staples-based economies. Should these predictions ring true, it brings a whole new variable into the equation. Will it? Who knows, it's all conjecture.
What, however, isn't really conjecture at all is the vast criticism of the current implementation of the Sherman Anti-trust laws within the political-economic and buisness law communities, ranging from the Chicago School, the Austrian School, renowned economists such as Friedman and JMK, and a variety of up and comers who are of the opinion that the Sherman Anti-trust laws are horribly outdated and need to be redefined before they can be applied to any company operating within the current market environment.
"We as consumers" doesn't mean the masses of blissfully oblivious buyers who can statistically be depended upon to support EA and Microsoft. "We as consumers" means people who know and care, like us--you know, statistically insignificant.
Ahh, I get it. You know, it's a shame because sites exist out there like The Consumerist and you'd like the think that they'd help people become more informed. The sad thing is that they're so on-sided that they often do more damage than good. Yeah, don't let yourself get taken, but at the same time when I go there and see stories written by people bitching that the banks stole their money because they have a daily transaction limit on their debit card, I can't help but feel alienated because I'm not a total moron.
