A useful big step would be to just use the exact antitrust regulations and laws we have had on the books since the first time we had to figure this out over a hundred years ago. Teddy Roosevelt helped take care of this, though we definitely didn't wield them against AT&T for too long.
They served us okay enough right up until Reagan decided that monopolies would be fine if they "benefited the consumer", as if that isn't a trivially stupid concept to anyone who has dealt with any system ever. Thanks to Reagan's admin, we allowed companies to nakedly take aggressive control of any market they want as long as they pretended they wouldn't raise prices.
We need to be less accepting of mergers and acquisitions too. If Google can just throw an absurd amount of money at any startup competitor to kill competition, it doesn't matter that it's not efficient, what human being will turn down $100 million just to stop competing? "Acquihires" are an anti-competitive practice
A company just having a lot of cash on hand can purposely pervert markets if you let them.
Conservatives complain about "punishing winners" but if you want a market to stay competitive, and therefore allow market forces to actually function, you cannot HAVE a "winner", or at least you can't let someone win so comprehensively that their resources end up warping the market just like a lot of mass warps spacetime. You must ensure that any company can be threatened by upstarts.
They served us okay enough right up until Reagan decided that monopolies would be fine if they "benefited the consumer", as if that isn't a trivially stupid concept to anyone who has dealt with any system ever. Thanks to Reagan's admin, we allowed companies to nakedly take aggressive control of any market they want as long as they pretended they wouldn't raise prices.
We need to be less accepting of mergers and acquisitions too. If Google can just throw an absurd amount of money at any startup competitor to kill competition, it doesn't matter that it's not efficient, what human being will turn down $100 million just to stop competing? "Acquihires" are an anti-competitive practice
A company just having a lot of cash on hand can purposely pervert markets if you let them.
Conservatives complain about "punishing winners" but if you want a market to stay competitive, and therefore allow market forces to actually function, you cannot HAVE a "winner", or at least you can't let someone win so comprehensively that their resources end up warping the market just like a lot of mass warps spacetime. You must ensure that any company can be threatened by upstarts.