About Antitrust laws?

Question

Please, only answers from people who know what they're talking about on this:

I was wondering, would antitrust legislation prevent a large corporation from holding control over companies in multiple markets (i.e. a corporation that owns, hypothetically, pharmaceutical manufacturers and communications companies) as long as there was reasonible competition in all the markets where that corporation has holdings? I'm writing a story that has a company like this, and wanted to make sure that the legalities involved wouldn't make such a thing impossible (even if certain combos of corporate holdings are immensely unlikely- hey suspension of disbelief can beat implausability, but not necessarily the impossible)

Answer 1

Anti-trust legislation has changed dramatically over the years, but the basic premise of anti-trust laws is that there has to be reasonable competition.

The first anti-trust legislation was put in place when companies would, (for example) own the mineral rights, the oil wells, the drilling companies, the refineries, the transportation companies and the distribution system, thus setting any price that they liked for fuel products. This was deemed to be anti-competitive at the time, and they were broken up.

Today, there are anti-trust lawsuits going on at any one time against almost any company that has a significant holding of one type or another. The best question to ask: If the holding company, thought its subsidiaries, has an almost exclusive market share of a product, (e.g. Microsoft with desktop operating systems) it *may* be found in violation of some countries and/or states anti-trust laws.

NOTE: I do NOT practice anti-trust law, and have no real interest in it. My only experience with it was an elective course that I avoided as much as I could.

Answer 2

sure, we've completely did no longer avert effective monopolies from coming up in lots of markets. opposite to what the laissez-faire cultists say, a corporation desire no longer have a hundred% industry share to act as a monopoly, it purely should be sufficiently massive to administration the industry and the strikes of its nominal opposition. case in point, at the same time as OPEC does not administration all the oil interior the worldwide, its industry potential is so massive that it efficiently monopolizes the international crude industry. extra critically than individual situations of monopoly however, is the monopolization of wealth and financial potential. relatively, rich persons, funds-heavy companies, sovereign wealth money and so on have secured such relatively some claims on financial output (expenditures) that the gadget has ceased to function. the persons on the backside of the gadget can not in all likelihood pay all the claims they owe, and the persons on the best will journey no textile benefit by capacity of having them paid. whether, the persons on the best are so obsessed on squeezing each final drop of blood from a stone that they are actually ate up no longer with generating, yet securing those money. The gadget of wealth advent is now working in opposite. thus, the economic gadget is collapsing like a house of enjoying cards, taking the actual economic gadget alongside with it.

Answer 3

Yeah, you're fine. A corporation can't hold a monopoly on all of one product or all of a chain of distribution. But lots of disparate holdings are perfectly fine.