Monopolies are going to be a hot button topic over the next decade

President Biden indirectly showed his hand a few weeks ago when he appointed legal scholar Lina Khan as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan has some non-standard views about what should be considered a monopoly in the United States and has pointed to big companies like Amazon. I'm still reading through her work so I'm not going to comment on it now. 

There is a lot to read. 

Conservatives don't even agree on the issues. Rachel Bovard at The American Conservative wants to explain why "Republicans Must Rethink Antitrust" and over at The National Review Robert Bork has a response to Ms Bovard entitled "The Dangers of a Conservative Antitrust Revival" Bork treats us to this exciting piece of hyperbole:

...she (Bovard) endorses a purported return to a conservative stand against bigness that would, if enacted, mean the end of capitalism as we know it in America.

All of this monopoly talk comes because a judge threw out an attempt to break up Facebook. Politico quotes Judge Boasberg:

Social networking “services are free to use, and the exact metes and bounds of what even constitutes [social networking] — i.e., which features of a company’s mobile app or website are included in that definition and which are excluded — are hardly crystal clear,” Boasberg ruled in an opinion dismissing the FTC’s complaint. “The FTC’s inability to offer any indication of the metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate Facebook’s market share renders its vague '60%-plus' assertion too speculative and conclusory to go forward.”

The fact that it's free seems to be the sticking point. Or that these purported monopolies don't show unfair price increases. Focusing not on price but on market power is the basis of FTC Chair Lina Khan's argument. The world and country will be learning and possibly changing the meaning of monopoly over the next few years.