Kidding aside, where exactly does it end? How do you consider when you’ve hit “too much” and how many pieces must be split out when you do? Should every product in the Office suite be offered only individually?
Indeed, a lot of people don't remember but back when spell checking was a new thing, there was genuine concern over whether bundling it with word processors was anticompetitive.
Or if Word and WordPerfect should be sold without spell checkers, and they'd need to interoperate with third party ones.
I find these kinds of rhetorical "where exactly does it end" comments really limp. Life is full of choices where there are grey areas. Lay out a bunch of desirable criteria - like not allowing a single entity to monopolise a market -then pick a starting point and iterate until you get a decent balance between the criteria. Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing after throwing your hands up into the air and whinging about the fact that it's complicated.
I understand your frustration, but it's genuinely not that easy.
You're right that there are a lot of gray areas in the law, where the two sides are clear but there's a blurry line. One famous example being, should Pringles be taxed as potato chips or as other chips? Because they're not fried slices of potatoes, they're a fried and shaped mixture of dried potatoes, corn flour, and rice flour. People think of them as potato chips, but they're not really. But it's still relatively straightforward to just draw a line somewhere.
The problem with antitrust is that we don't really know how to define it at all. It's not just a single dimension like "is it a potato chip?" where there's just a single line. It's more like a blob with lots of dimensions where different reasonable completely just completely disagree on what the basic most important elements even are.
> Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing
That's where you're wrong. Badly applied antitrust law can actually be much worse than doing nothing.
I'm not saying to give up. I'm just saying, it's not nearly as easy as you're making it sound. There are really smart people who research antitrust and try to come up with recommendations, and they have profound disagreements with each other. The problem is actually a lot harder than you seem to think it is.
Kidding aside, where exactly does it end? How do you consider when you’ve hit “too much” and how many pieces must be split out when you do? Should every product in the Office suite be offered only individually?