Comment by refurb
> If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.
How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products, resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the opposite of "society is served better".
We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.
By the time a company becomes a monopoly, it is immensely powerful - politically and monetarily - getting rid of it or splitting it up is near impossible. Monopoly laws are near impossible to apply as the corporation has sufficient money and influence to turn politicians into servile puppets.
Best to nip corpos before they gain more revenue than a nation state and become "too big to fail".