> The act was designed to restore competition, but it was loosely worded and failed to define such critical terms as "trust," "combination," "conspiracy," and "monopoly." Five years later, the Supreme Court dismantled the act in United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895). The Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the defendants in the case, had not violated the law even though the company controlled about 98% of all sugar refining in the United States. The Supreme Court reasoned that the company’s control of manufacture did not constitute a control of trade.

The reality is that the law itself was not very well written, and takes an extremely litigious executive branch to do anything with.

Even if you agreed with the premise (the idea that Standard Oil arose purely through conspiracy is clearly wrong), it's ultimately a very ticky tacky set of definitions and has failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy (do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?)

(The notable exceptions being actual illegal coordination - like was recently uncovered in the egg industry. But these have more to do with price fixing amongst competitors and less with actual Trusts/Monopolies)

The only practical way that countries have tackled monopolies has been to write legislation that specifically puts oversight on that industry.

That's what the article says. But Knight was mostly overturned by Swift. Wikipedia has a decent overview of US antitrust law.[1] The ongoing question is the extent to which courts and the Justice Department should look at the economic implications of sheer size.

If you just grow to being #1 without acquiring your big competitors, that's generally OK in the US. It's competition, not collusion. Google never acquired Yahoo or Bing. Facebook never acquired Myspace or Twitter. So there was no key merger to block.

European Union antitrust policy is based more on the goal of having several major competitors, so there's price competition. An EU study indicates that, below four competitors, the leaders tend to implicitly collude. But in industries with strong network effects, it's hard to have many big competitors.

A modern summary from a law firm: [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

[2] https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20...

I definitely agree that the law was not written with clarity in mind. On the one hand, that gives flexibility to those companies which might try to skirt legislation through technicality, but it bites the other way too, in that the executive needs to be very willing to enforce and defend its enforcement.

I wholly disagree that it failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy, though. Under Sherman AT&T was split, which, before the baby bells all merged back together to create the present oligopoly, provided a much more competitive landscape for the telecom industry. And who knows what we would have seen if the original Microsoft decision was held up calling for a break up, instead of the neutered decision we saw come out of their appeal.

There is a surprisingly high amount of legislation that seems shockingly poorly written unless one thought that as a feature rather than an bug.

E.g., while the 25th amendment prohibits someone from being elected president more than twice, it does not prohibit succession into presidency, such as by becoming the Speaker of the House (which position does not require one being a US Representative in the House) and President and Vice President resigning. That may seem unlikely or an outlier but on a site like hackers news, I would assume that we would relish the outliers that have bedeviled our software career

>”do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?”

The antitrust attention distracted Microsoft so badly in the early 2000s that it completely gimped their ability to leverage Internet Explorer’s dominance, thus opening the door for new browsers like Firefox (née Firebird) and Chrome.

So yes, it was actually critical in creating the conditions for an open Web 2.0.

It wasn’t just the US antitrust of the late 1990s, but the EU also had their own legal challenge that targeted IE specifically. This doesn’t get enough credit IMO — the combination was powerful enough to break Microsoft’s hold on the market. Of course SV libertarian types would prefer to write it out of history and say the market sorted this one out on its own.

(Kids these days don’t remember when Mac OS X shipped with Internet Explorer as the only browser…)

> The only practical way that countries have tackled monopolies has been to write legislation that specifically puts oversight on that industry.

I'm reminded of what that notorious old socialist Adam Smith said about this:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Good to see continuing evidence that the supreme Court continues to be an injust violent tool against the American people, a sad perpetrated of plutocracy.