"That's why we need anti-trust in the first place."
Moreover, it seems to me these laws ought to strengthened to make executives/decision makers even more accountable.
The people who made Google a monopoly aren't stupid and knew full well what they were doing. They should not be able to hide behind Google's corporate structure and also should be penalized for their bad behavior.
Yes, this is one of the big changes that need to be made to really reform things. Companies act based on decisions made by individuals. Those individuals should be held accountable if the company's actions are found to be harmful. There should be lots of CEOs and board members of companies in oil, healthcare, housing, retail (as well as tech) who should be facing fines in the hundreds of millions (if not the billions) on their personal assets.
One thing I forgot. There's another good reason to hold CEOs and others personally responsible and punish them accordingly as it acts as a deterrent. Whenever we see Google, Facebook, etc. get levied with fines we rarely learn who the nameless gnomes are who perpetrated the act, or approved it, etc. Knowing that their names would be in the public domain would send shivers down their backs, even if acquitted it would likely not bode well for future employment.
Moreover, CEOs, directors, boards etc. should also be held accountable even when they are not directly responsible (like captains of ships are). This would have the effect of ensuring that those in charge would mandate an ethics and behavior policy for the company and ensure that all employees were aware of it, and violation thereof would result in dismissal.
Thst said, to be fair, you can't blame management for the unacceptable behavior of a wayward or stupid employee. Commonsense must prevail and laws must allow for such things.
Customers frequently prefer cheap bundles. The right time for an antitrust decision is often when the company is large and stops behaving competitively.
Customers acting individually have a short-term perspective which leads them to prefer low prices in general, which is why strategies like price dumping work - yet they are illegal for a reason.
The problem is that once the monopolist is entrenched and all competition killed off, those cheap bundles stop being cheap. Hence why you need someone to take the long term view and nip these kinds of things in the bud. A democratically elected government is the best avenue for that.
A democratically elected government won’t force prices to be raised in a market if consumers benefit and the regulator or court finds marginal costs to also be driven down by scale.
