анонимный вопрос

Yeah. Here, as with discussions about socialism, it is important not to get bogged down in details. You tell a person about Venezuela, and they reply that it’s the wrong kind of socialism, and that it’s under sanctions anyway. The same goes for antitrust cases: you explain that after the forced breakup of Standard Oil, oil prices only rose, and they will cite a bunch of additional factors or simply say it was an isolated incident. You talk about the pointlessness of the Russian FAS, and they’ll say that everything in Russia is messed up, but in decent countries, it’s a different story.

It seems to me that it would be far more productive to provide a general understanding of the factors influencing a firm’s size and its operating strategy.

Let’s consider a certain company. It buys some product on the market, uses it to produce another product, and sells this new product. What the input product is doesn’t really matter. It could be raw materials, semi-finished products, human labor, technology, and so on. What the output product is also doesn’t really matter; it could even be the same product as the input, just moved to a different point in space, preserved in time, or repackaged into different containers.

A company can change in size, and this changes the efficiency of its activities (that is, income relative to investment). There are factors that lead to an increase in efficiency as a company grows larger. For example, a transportation company can afford to use higher-capacity vehicles, where the costs per unit of weight are significantly lower. And there are factors that lead to a decrease in efficiency as a company grows. For example, the expansion of a boutique chain beyond wealthy neighborhoods results in peripheral outlets bringing in less money.

As sales markets expand and progress is made in the organization of business processes, there are more and more niches in the world where large companies are most efficient. Moreover, it may turn out that a certain market simply cannot accommodate more than one or two companies, and attempting to prevent their growth or breaking up existing ones will lead to a drop in efficiency and, accordingly, a flight of capital to more profitable industries. Thus, an external regulator will only oppress the industry by increasing production costs, which may lead to price increases or savings on quality—exactly the opposite of the regulator’s goal.

At the same time, as I already detailed for the case with Microsoft specifically, even if a company dominates a certain market, under conditions of free competition, it still cannot relax and earn superprofits from monopoly rent, so nothing threatens the consumer.

At the same time, there are factors that hinder the growth of companies, so monsters formed through unsuccessful mergers and acquisitions lose efficiency and, after a while, begin to rid themselves of unnecessary parts if they do not want to go bankrupt; so here too, the presence of antitrust authorities is completely redundant.

Finally, there are state corporations for whose management the efficiency of the corporation’s operation is not important at all; what matters is the size of their personal income, which is most easily increased with substantial turnover. Therefore, state corporations will tend to expand regardless of market conditions, but this is exactly where antitrust authorities are powerless, as they are themselves precisely the same part of the state.

So, no matter how you look at it, antitrust authorities provide no benefit to either business or consumers; there is only benefit for the wallets of those who have direct influence over these bodies or access to insider information about their work.