Comment by AnthonyMouse

Comment by AnthonyMouse 21 hours ago

> who bears the costs of this suit?

The goal is to not have it happen, because the company is going to see that they're only slightly below the threshold and voluntarily split themselves into smaller pieces and buy themselves a safety margin because if they don't everybody knows the lawsuits are going to vaporize them once they exceed the threshold.

> And who determines what makes for a good market share size to be the threshold?

Anything in the vicinity of 5%-15% would be fine.

> And by having such a rule, an industry that would have higher efficiency to when consolidated would not be able to (but you wouldn't know).

This is extremely rare and the circumstances where it happens aren't a mystery. It's when entering the market has extremely high fixed costs but then the unit cost of usage is negligible, e.g. it costs a huge amount of money to install water and sewer but then the incremental cost of someone washing their hands is insignificant.

For those things you either have the government do them, or if it's a private company then it's a regulated utility which is completely banned from anything that even vaguely resembles vertical integration as the price of being allowed to have more than the threshold amount of market share.

> A better way would be for gov't to increase competition by adding supply, or demand, whichever one is the bottleneck to competition.

The problem is generally caused by the incumbents capturing the government and then enacting rules that inhibit rather than increase competition. That's why you need anyone to be able to initiate the lawsuit, so they can't capture the government department which is supposed to be thwarting them because then it's the entire public.

chii 21 hours ago

> so they can't capture the government department

so why not solve this issue directly? Transparency, auditing and public awareness etc are needed to prevent regulatory capture. Public apathy are the reason why it is currently "easy" to do capture regulators.

The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone in the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more profit. So unless the law suit enables the accuser to wholesale take a piece of that company as private property from the owners - which no law currently would allow nor have precedents for - why would anyone expend private money for a public good?

And in any case, i don't the apathy going away, even if the law suit was free. Because currently, the same apathy is allowing regulatory capture in the first place. So solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the solution.

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AnthonyMouse 19 hours ago

> Transparency, auditing and public awareness etc are needed to prevent regulatory capture. Public apathy are the reason why it is currently "easy" to do capture regulators.
It's mostly easy because the people doing it are good at lying. When they create a rule it isn't called the "mandate this company's product rule" or the "increase fixed costs to lock out smaller competitors rule", it's sold as a safety measure or consumer protection or some other pretext, even though the effect is to raise costs to the benefit of the companies getting the money or exclude competitors to the benefit of the incumbents.
Or they simply don't prosecute antitrust violations, and then there is nothing to audit because there is nothing happening, meanwhile people are kept distracted with other things.
> The fact is even if a law suit is possible from anyone in the public, no one is going to pay to do a law suit (which has costs), when the result doesn't net them more profit.
It does net them more profit. The premise is that having more than the threshold amount of market share is a strict liability antitrust violation, which allows any customer or prospective customer (i.e. anyone) to sue them for it. The person who files the lawsuit would get the money, the same as someone who sues a company for pollution or fraud.
The point of letting people sue you for polluting or fraud or, in this case, market consolidation, isn't to make plaintiffs rich, it's to deter the thing you don't want companies to do. The goal isn't to have a lot of lawsuits, the goal is to have companies not want the market to consolidate and actively prevent it because if it happens they'll get sued.
> So solving public apathy first, and foremost, is the solution.
Apathy is cyclical. People don't care until the problem gets bad enough, then they care enough to demand change and make it go away for a while, then they stop caring until it gets bad enough again.
But you don't want people to have to die or get severely abused before the problem gets addressed. What you want is to change the structure of the system to prevent it from getting that bad to begin with, by making sure that the power to nip the problem in the bud (i.e. stop market consolidation at 5% or 15% instead of 50% or 90%) is held by someone who will actually exercise it, which can be accomplished by granting that power to everyone affected, which in this context is each and every member of the public.

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