Business and Industry

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | From the December 2024 issue

Antitrust law has a storied place in modern American history, where it allegedly allowed authorities to thwart big bad monopolies out to bilk and milk consumers. But many of these past victories are more hollow than historic lore lets on.

Take the iconic Standard Oil case, launched in 1906. The company would eventually be found guilty of abusing monopoly power in the petroleum industry. But while some of Standard Oil's practices may have harmed its competitors, they led to lower prices for consumers and a more efficient distribution process.

Or take the case where charges were filed in 1937 against the Aluminum Company of America, which had cornered most of the virgin aluminum ingot market. A federal appeals court found the company had not become a monopoly through some nefarious scheme or used its dominant position to charge excessive prices. Nonetheless, it unfairly excluded competition by "progressively [embracing] each new opportunity as it opened, and [facing] every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, thanks to having the advantage of experience, trade connection and the elite of personnel."

More recent cases—from the IBM and Microsoft suits launched in the latter half of the 20th century to the Trump- and Biden-era efforts against Amazon, Google, and Meta—tend to be based on similarly flimsy........

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