It’s damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn’t have to fear competitors.
It’s a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it. What am I, a mind-reader? But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company’s CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company’s history.
Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.
Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.
i only know of this because I did an internship at AT&T https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Yeah, Ma Bell breaking up into the Baby Bells is the only real example I can think of, and even they came back together later (though, by then, there was enough diversity in the market that they couldn’t reclaim the level of market dominance they once had)
The ATT orientation video about that is hilarious. It shows how Ma Bell was broken up, and then it just circles back around to it coming back together. On a map, with arrows lol