>>3782885 pb
great stuff here, don't agree 100% with everything, but, yeah.
What about that ol Sherman Anti-Trust Act? We need to dust that off and really use it. Maybe the Supreme Court takes a different approach, ripping apart big companies into tiny pieces? Back in the old days there was no constitutional right to sodomy or abortion, but, somehow, the s ct found it there that one time.
I don't remember what the various standards are for oligopolistic this and monopolistic that are, but whatever it is, S Ct decisions can be replaced. New antitrust jurisprudence could be around the corner. Go ahead and interpret Sherman so that Google is "presumptively noncompetitive" (just to make something up that isn't necessarily right) and because they're "presumptively noncompetitive" they are barred from any further acquistitions. They're one of the many "presumptively noncompetitive" or "presumptively monopolistic" or "presumptively oligopolistic" or whatever legal bs you want, when what you want is to grab a whole bunch of big media companies, or internet companies or other companies, and you want to put a moritorium on any acquisitions, to prevent further consolidations.
We, the Supreme Court, realized that we let these companies get too big. Back then it was ok if a company controlled 1/3 of the market. But we realize now that fuck them and we think that any company can own 1 tv station period, one cable channel. Anything else is too big.
We haven't figured out the details yet, but if you've got more than cable channel, you're "presumptively monopolistic" and you're barred from any further acquisitions until we figure out exactly what we're going to do with you.
Times change, there is a clear public interest in having an extremely diverse set of voices of all types. We should have 500 different channels, not 500 channels that all seem the same, by the same 6 companies.
Perhaps Trump in an executive order (here's where losing the house becomes difficult, because this is something that seems like it should be legislation, Sherman Act II Now We're Getting Tough, but an Executive Order that defines presumptively monopolistic and a new get tough on monopolies policy, and then that off to a friendly S Ct maybe that could work.