The American elite has *always* hated antitrust. In the 1980s, #RonaldReagan, abetted by #RobertBork and his co-conspirators at the #ChicagoSchoolOfEconomics gutted antitrust through something called the "#ConsumerWelfareStandard," which ended anti-monopoly enforcement except in instances where price hikes could be directly and unarguably attributed to market power, which is, basically, never.

9/

They may not be particularly invested in defending Google itself. Rather, they represent the last gasp of a 40-year-long conspiratorial legal ideology that embraced the Reagan-era idea of "consumer welfare":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

This ideology begins with #RobertBork, Nixon's crooked solicitor general, whose crimes scuttled his Supreme Court nomination (his failed confirmation hearing was so cringe-inducing that it spawned the term "#borked").

7/

But even though the incipiency standard remains on the books, its enforcement dwindled away to nothing, starting in the #Reagan era, thanks to the #ChicagoSchool's influence. The neoliberal economists of Chicago, led by the Nixonite criminal #RobertBork, counseled that most monopolies were "efficient" and the inefficient ones would self-correct when new businesses challenged them, and demanded a halt to antitrust enforcement.

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@eludom The initial thread scope was Doctorow's discussion of monopoly harms, and especially Robert Bork and Aaron Director's whole-cloth invention of "consumer value" as the sole concern of anti-trust policy, which is an utter fabrication, that's become the operative model in the US, and elsewhere, thanks specifically to their project to instill this myth.

AT&T operated under anti-trust and consent-decree investigations and limitations since 1913 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T#Monopoly). The development of UNIX by Ritchie & Thompson occurred under terms of a 1956 consent decree forbidding the company from taking part in the "computer systems" (devices, software, operating systems) market. The options were to shelve to project ... or give it away. "From Ken, with love" tapes of the system were not directly supported by corporate policy, but weren't forbidden either. A grey no-property zone.

By 1980, the final stages of the US v. AT&T case, filed in 1974, were clear. The company would be broken up 4 years later, its monopoly was largely broken, and the Unix Wars and BSD lawsuit began, with the unencumbered from-scratch alternative Linux gaining a critical foothold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

Since then, the Baby Bells have re-merged and the monopoly resurrected, though in different form and in a different telecoms and computing environment.

#AT&T #antitrust #monopoly #unix #bsd #UnixWars #linux #RobertBork #AaronDirector #UniversityOfChicago