The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
Antitrust fights in the tech industry have always been problematic. Software is a “non-rival” good — additional copies cost nothing to produce, and one person possessing it doesn’t exclude another — so monopolies don’t feel like such a big problem, and the industry changes so quickly that monopolies tend to be fleeting. The last big antitrust battle in tech, the 1990s-era case against Microsoft, created a lot of sound and fury but mostly succeeded in distracting, rather than dismantling, its target.
Nonetheless, Amazon’s deal to buy Whole Foods has raised a whole new wave of antitrust talk — like this in-depth discussion in The Yale Law Journal, or this essay by Oliver Staley in Quartz that compares Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to John D. Rockefeller.
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