American antitrust laws were originally written to protect competitors as well as consumers, and to limit corporate power, but during the 80s the laws were re-interpreted (largely because of Robert Bork's writings) to greatly restrict antitrust enforcement.
I agree. In fact, "consumer welfare" is tantamount to repealing antitrust, and the growth of FAANG can be directly traced to this change in legal standard.
Literally every monopoly ever can be said to have a consumer welfare benefit. Competition is always at least a little anti-consumer - you have to consider alternatives and multiple business relationships, and consumers have a risk of those alternatives being inferior or outright harmful.
The problem is that nobody is ever purely a "consumer". There are no professional consumers whose entire life is just buying and using things[0]. "Consumer" is just a hat that people wear among many others. So whatever welfare consumers get from larger firms is mere compensation for welfare lost when those same people are either working for or operating the firms at the other end of the business. Even if someone isn't both a user and developer on Apple platforms, they are indirectly impacted when those developers are harmed by Apple's misconduct, and have to compensate in other ways, such as charging more money across-the-board or skimping on other things. (e.g. not shipping an Android version of their app because App Store compliance is taking up too much developer time)
[0] Though, the attitude I've gotten from some Apple users would imply that their entire life literally is just buying things on their iPhone.
> In fact, "consumer welfare" is tantamount to repealing antitrust, and the growth of FAANG can be directly traced to this change in legal standard.
Literally every monopoly ever can be said to have a consumer welfare benefit.
Eh? Not at all. The entire point (in classical economic theory) is that a monopoly, compared to perfect competition, reduces consumer surplus and arrogates a part of that to itself as rent (thereby reducing total social surplus).
>but during the 80s the laws were re-interpreted (largely because of Robert Bork's writings) to greatly restrict antitrust enforcement.
It's because the old standard didn't make any sense either. The most ridiculous of which was United States v. Von's Grocery Co., which blocked a merger of two grocers in LA with a combined market share of 8%.
