It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".

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inigyou 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Anti-monopoly failing is the effect, not the cause - how is there a monopoly to start with?

	▲	danaris 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You may be poorly educated as to how antitrust is supposed to work. Breaking up monopolies that already exist is only one of its purposes and tools. It is also there to prevent mergers that will be detrimental to the public. Past a certain (very low) scale threshold, this should be assumed to be "almost all of them". Rather than the government having to prove that a merger would be detrimental, the companies wanting to merge should be required to prove that the merger would be beneficial to the public in long-term ways that do not require specific (and easily breakable) "commitments" on their part to do things like keep prices low.