> I'd imagine Amazon fears becoming a monopoly. US/EU antitrust would break them up pronto.
Name three monopolies that were broken up while it made a difference. In which of those cases did consumer prices go down as a result of the breakup?
The only "broken up while it made a difference" case that I'm aware of is Standard Oil. However, the result was higher prices, not lower. (Standard absolutely hammered transportation companies and passed on the savings to consumers. After the breakup, transportation companies could turn down biz from one oil company to get biz from another and thus were able to raise their prices. That's why railroads pushed for the breakup.)
Ok, off topic, but AT&T breakup was good. Didn't actually lower prices, but services sprouted like weeds. For 100 years, a simple desktop landline (2 different models! Black or green!) turned into the explosion of products and services we have today.
The AT&T breakup happened after sprint et al started offering long distance services.
The carterfone decision, which happened before that, is what gave us phone choice.
There was some post-breakup price-reduction in local services, but they all came from the local monopolies that were the result of the AT&T breakup. The services themselves, with the exception of caller-id, were offered by pre-breakup AT&T but were more expensive. Since the land-line service price decline happened when cell-phone carriers started offering those same services for less, I think that cell-phone competition gets the credit, not the breakup.
And beige was available before green. (I think that white was as well.)
> I'd think cell-phones themselves came to life post-ATT monopoly.
I thought that I said that.
> That whole industry was part of the windfall.
How so? Are you claiming that AT&T would have been granted a cell-phone monopoly if it hadn't been broken up? If so, why weren't the baby bells, which still had a land-line monopoly, given a cell phone monopoly?
I think that the success of sprint et al wrt long distance by the time that cell-phones were taking off pretty much guaranteed that there AT&T wouldn't be granted a cell phone monoply even if the break-up hadn't occurred.
