By their own admission, monopolies are not efficient and they are actively hurting the consumer by their size.
When will we call the antitrust experiment from the 80s era “Chicago school of economics” an abject failure? Google should instead be several companies, each with a duty to consumers to compete with other companies in their respective businesses.
Even Google knows it, not that their leadership would ever admit it. Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.
A monopoly is basically a Marxist-Leninist command economy writ small which means it inevitably has all of the same dysfunctions.
In other words, Marx was right about how laissez-faire capitalism leads to communism (though of course he was wrong about this being inevitable or good). If monopolies are completely allowed to run amok, eventually you will have a single monopoly of everything that will be powerful enough to control the government and weaponize said government against its critics and anybody who tries to compete with it.
This is appealing to the people at the top of monopolies and those who think they can climb to the top for the same reason why many people prefer being the dictator of an impoverished country over being a commoner in a wealthy country. A significant portion of humanity cares more about relative status than absolute status and, to them, equal treatment feels like oppression.
That’s a direct result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That law will shape this century. It gave us the blessing of the internet as we know it and the curse of the media consolidation and assault on political speech that was accelerated by the elimination of restrictions on media ownership and the eventual Supreme Court decisions that gutted campaign finance rules.
Without that law, the alignment of companies like IBM and AT&T’s derivatives would have dominated big business and prevented the startup ecosystem from developing.
IBM reached its zenith the day before the Compaq PC came out. The Compaq meant the industry had left IBM behind, and IBM's attempt to catch up, the PS/2 and the PCjr, were failures. (The PCjr was a crippled PC, and the PS/2 was deliberately incompatible with all the PC hardware aftermarket.) After that, nobody was afraid of IBM anymore.
All the DECheads (like me) were sure that DEC would swoop in with the LSI-11 packaged as a PC and would wipe the floor in the PC business. Imagine our disappointment when the Rainbow PC came out, a crippled 8086 PC. That was the end of DEC's loyal customer base.
There is no need for continuity of monopolies for them to exist. The monopoly of today can split and be merged with other companies, with the same end result. After all, even monopolies need to reinvent themselves to better serve their owners.
You have a misunderstanding about Marxism. Marx already knew about the monopolistic nature of capitalism. This nature leads to concentration of power in the hands of a few owners of capital, while everybody else is stripped of ownership. This is not very different from the serfdom of middle ages. Marxism proposes to solve this by abolishing ownership, so no-one can control the capital, which becomes a shared resource. So the difference is not on the process (it will happen as he described) only about who controls it.
> Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.
Monopolies offer the most reward to those who would fashion themselves out to be robber barons. There are a lot of people that would take that title, more than there are opportunities. Why settle for millions when you can take billions? The pursuit of money brings out the sociopaths, who by definition do not care about externalities web seeking their fortunes.
When will we call the antitrust experiment from the 80s era “Chicago school of economics” an abject failure? Google should instead be several companies, each with a duty to consumers to compete with other companies in their respective businesses.
Even Google knows it, not that their leadership would ever admit it. Slow, wasteful monopolies are still appealing to those at the top of hierarchies.