I wish we had statutory antitrust mechanisms instead. Get to be a certain size, you have to be a public company. Have a sustained supermajority of the market? You have to file a plan to split up.

Companies are basically mini governments. They have leadership (CEO / President), board, etc. However they are they are not democratic. Corporate takeovers happen when an entity with lots of money buys your shares. As such, the rule of the jungle abounds, not the rule of "lets make good products" or "lets have self respect".

One thing I wish being a public company entailed was having a set of internal shares that are distributed only to the people working there, that allowed them to vote on board members / top leadership positions. For example, Amazon currently abuses its delivery staff, but I suspect this is a policy that is not endorsed by the majority of Amazon employees. In a democratic public company, there would be a feedback loop that enables the employees to have a voice.

I see this as a way of having built in regulation, where the government doesn't need to pass laws that are continuously becoming outdated but instead giving the people on the ground the ability to fight for their rights.

I don't see it as useful for small companies, but I agree that a large enough company should be forced to be public + democratic. Going from the rule of the rich to the rule of the people that work there.

The part i've not been able to wrangle is what to do about companies which are internationally monopolies? Couldn't they just pick the winners/losers of local companies and ensure their own supply chain is the one that survives? That seems worse than a national monopoly that is at least HQ'd inside your borders.

This was explored theoretically a few times, but the problem is it's really hard for this not to become extremely anti-consumer.

iPhones dominate the cellphone market? You now have to figure out a way to split the manufacturing and selling of iPhones across multiple different entities. Consumers end up with a handful of worse products that all cost more.

When AT&T was split up, it was just turned into a bunch of smaller regional monopolies that were in a lot of ways worse. It also forced the closure of Bell Labs - one of the most important R&D powerhouses in the US. (Most of these regional monopolies would end up merging back into bigger monopolies over time anyway)