A Brief History
On December 14, 2017, the Walt Disney Company continued a trend of corporate mergers and acquisitions that are killing competition in many markets when they announced the deal to acquire the 20th Century Fox movie studio for over $52 billion.
Digging Deeper
Way back in 1890, Congress realized the problem with only a few companies owning too much of a market, and passed the Sherman Act, the first major anti-trust law in the US. President Teddy Roosevelt built on a reputation as a “trust buster” to protect competitive commerce, but his successor, President William Taft, proved to be a real trust buster.
Major conglomerates broken up to enhance competition included Standard Oil in 1911, and telephone giant AT&T in 1984.
Car companies, oil companies, steel companies, entertainment and media companies, and banks have in recent years made a mockery of anti-trust laws. Will this trend ever end? How can we restore competition?
Question for students (and subscribers): What monopoly needs to be broken up the most? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Hartmann, Thom. The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. Berrett-Koehler Publishers , 2020.
Hindman, Matthew. The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2018.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Coolcaesar of The Walt Disney Studios corporate headquarters in Burbank, California, 2016, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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