Anti-monopoly laws are good, but how about some harsh anti-duopoly laws?
Could also hit the iOS-Android bird with the same stone!
Anti-monopoly laws are good, but how about some harsh anti-duopoly laws?
Could also hit the iOS-Android bird with the same stone!
Existing "antimonopoly" laws already cover unfair competition, market manipulation, etc. regardless of the number of entities.
It’s not even a duopoly, look at the majority shareholders of both Visa and Mastercard, Vanguard and Black-rock in both. So it’s effectively a monopoly.
Vanguard and Blackrock are just asset managers. Public companies are owned by everyone with mutual funds, like pension funds and individual retirement accounts.
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.34N76K4
Thanks, but ”just asset managers” feels a bit generous, from that same link; ”But large asset managers may help bring issues to the attention of boards.” Is that the case here, no idea (likely not), but I do find it strange that both Visa and Mastercard refuse to take part of the multi billion dollar industry that is adult content. I have heard that it’s a volatile market with a lot of cash backs and fraudulent transactions, but they are happy to participate in other such endeavors.
How many more trillion dollar of assets do they need to "manage" before people start realizing that for all intents and purposes the one moving money around has more power and influnce than the one that actually owning it. See ESG score
The problem isn't the lack of laws, it's the lack of enforcement. Biden's FTC gave us a glimpse of what a working antitrust enforcer could look like, and it caused a bunch of influential billionaires to switch political allegiances.
There's no escaping the politics here. You can't enforce antitrust without hitting the billionaire class directly, and those people know how to influence American politics in their favor. Just look at what happened to the "click to cancel" rule post-Trump, something that is unambiguously pro-consumer and exactly the type of thing the FTC should be doing.