I basically agree with the post and it's similar to what I was saying in comments on another post a few days ago. Trying to impose piecemeal conditions on monopolists is more trouble than it's worth. They should just be forcibly dismantled.
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.