> The act was designed to restore competition, but it was loosely worded and failed to define such critical terms as "trust," "combination," "conspiracy," and "monopoly." Five years later, the Supreme Court dismantled the act in United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895). The Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the defendants in the case, had not violated the law even though the company controlled about 98% of all sugar refining in the United States. The Supreme Court reasoned that the company’s control of manufacture did not constitute a control of trade.
The reality is that the law itself was not very well written, and takes an extremely litigious executive branch to do anything with.
Even if you agreed with the premise (the idea that Standard Oil arose purely through conspiracy is clearly wrong), it's ultimately a very ticky tacky set of definitions and has failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy (do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?)
(The notable exceptions being actual illegal coordination - like was recently uncovered in the egg industry. But these have more to do with price fixing amongst competitors and less with actual Trusts/Monopolies)
The only practical way that countries have tackled monopolies has been to write legislation that specifically puts oversight on that industry.
There is a surprisingly high amount of legislation that seems shockingly poorly written unless one thought that as a feature rather than an bug.
E.g., while the 25th amendment prohibits someone from being elected president more than twice, it does not prohibit succession into presidency, such as by becoming the Speaker of the House (which position does not require one being a US Representative in the House) and President and Vice President resigning. That may seem unlikely or an outlier but on a site like hackers news, I would assume that we would relish the outliers that have bedeviled our software career
I definitely agree that the law was not written with clarity in mind. On the one hand, that gives flexibility to those companies which might try to skirt legislation through technicality, but it bites the other way too, in that the executive needs to be very willing to enforce and defend its enforcement.
I wholly disagree that it failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy, though. Under Sherman AT&T was split, which, before the baby bells all merged back together to create the present oligopoly, provided a much more competitive landscape for the telecom industry. And who knows what we would have seen if the original Microsoft decision was held up calling for a break up, instead of the neutered decision we saw come out of their appeal.
That's what the article says. But Knight was mostly overturned by Swift.
Wikipedia has a decent overview of US antitrust law.[1]
The ongoing question is the extent to which courts and the Justice Department should look at the economic implications of sheer size.
If you just grow to being #1 without acquiring your big competitors, that's generally OK in the US. It's competition, not collusion. Google never acquired Yahoo or Bing. Facebook never acquired Myspace or Twitter. So there was no key merger to block.
European Union antitrust policy is based more on the goal of having several major competitors, so there's price competition. An EU study indicates that, below four competitors, the leaders tend to implicitly collude. But in industries with strong network effects, it's hard to have many big competitors.
They did acquire Instagram & Whatsapp, which their internal communications show was to block competition of a credible threat despite clever legal maneuvering to have the FTC antitrust case dismissed.
This is also where a lot of it gets ticky tacky. The difference between being anti-competitive and acting competitively against a credible threat is often in the eye of the beholder.
Good to see continuing evidence that the supreme Court continues to be an injust violent tool against the American people, a sad perpetrated of plutocracy.
>”do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?”
The antitrust attention distracted Microsoft so badly in the early 2000s that it completely gimped their ability to leverage Internet Explorer’s dominance, thus opening the door for new browsers like Firefox (née Firebird) and Chrome.
So yes, it was actually critical in creating the conditions for an open Web 2.0.
It wasn’t just the US antitrust of the late 1990s, but the EU also had their own legal challenge that targeted IE specifically. This doesn’t get enough credit IMO — the combination was powerful enough to break Microsoft’s hold on the market. Of course SV libertarian types would prefer to write it out of history and say the market sorted this one out on its own.
(Kids these days don’t remember when Mac OS X shipped with Internet Explorer as the only browser…)
I wish we had statutory antitrust mechanisms instead. Get to be a certain size, you have to be a public company. Have a sustained supermajority of the market? You have to file a plan to split up.
The part i've not been able to wrangle is what to do about companies which are internationally monopolies? Couldn't they just pick the winners/losers of local companies and ensure their own supply chain is the one that survives? That seems worse than a national monopoly that is at least HQ'd inside your borders.
This was explored theoretically a few times, but the problem is it's really hard for this not to become extremely anti-consumer.
iPhones dominate the cellphone market? You now have to figure out a way to split the manufacturing and selling of iPhones across multiple different entities. Consumers end up with a handful of worse products that all cost more.
When AT&T was split up, it was just turned into a bunch of smaller regional monopolies that were in a lot of ways worse. It also forced the closure of Bell Labs - one of the most important R&D powerhouses in the US. (Most of these regional monopolies would end up merging back into bigger monopolies over time anyway)
AT&T was much more heavily regulated to operate in the public interest in a way that iPhone manufacturers are not. It's not so clear-cut that the regional monopolies were worse because they were smaller, rather than because they were no longer as strictly regulated.
Companies are basically mini governments. They have leadership (CEO / President), board, etc. However they are they are not democratic. Corporate takeovers happen when an entity with lots of money buys your shares. As such, the rule of the jungle abounds, not the rule of "lets make good products" or "lets have self respect".
One thing I wish being a public company entailed was having a set of internal shares that are distributed only to the people working there, that allowed them to vote on board members / top leadership positions. For example, Amazon currently abuses its delivery staff, but I suspect this is a policy that is not endorsed by the majority of Amazon employees. In a democratic public company, there would be a feedback loop that enables the employees to have a voice.
I see this as a way of having built in regulation, where the government doesn't need to pass laws that are continuously becoming outdated but instead giving the people on the ground the ability to fight for their rights.
I don't see it as useful for small companies, but I agree that a large enough company should be forced to be public + democratic. Going from the rule of the rich to the rule of the people that work there.
> The model that underlies Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 is a step forward in general capabilities. However, during the model’s training, we took steps to limit advances in the specific research capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development. Thus, in relevant areas, including accelerator kernel optimization and improving large language model architectures, Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 perform at about the level of Opus 5.5. Importantly, we ensured that the training changes did not affect related capabilities like agentic coding, hardware development, and traditional AI or machine learning research (including interpretability research). We do not alter these capabilities as the model is being served to users (that is, at inference time). As described in Section 1.5 of the System Card and similarly to previous models, Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 also include transparent fallbacks to Opus 5 for a small set of topics in this domain, including kernel development on certain nonstandard accelerators.
-----
> Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
> Sec. 1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or other- wise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any such contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, at the discretion of the court.
> Sec. 2. Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof; shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
> punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Something tells me that's not gonna do much to dissuade the AI cartels...
>...shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Wow, I believe violating Section 1201 of the DMCA carries a stiffer penalty these days.
That quote is from the original 1890 text. The statute has been amended and criminal violations are now felonies with bigger penalties including $100 million fines and 10 years in jail.
The implication of the comment is that Anthropic is limiting the capabilities of their external models to prevent other companies from building models that can compete with Claude, and that this constitutes anticompetitive behavior under the law.
> The act was designed to restore competition, but it was loosely worded and failed to define such critical terms as "trust," "combination," "conspiracy," and "monopoly." Five years later, the Supreme Court dismantled the act in United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895). The Court ruled that the American Sugar Refining Company, one of the defendants in the case, had not violated the law even though the company controlled about 98% of all sugar refining in the United States. The Supreme Court reasoned that the company’s control of manufacture did not constitute a control of trade.
The reality is that the law itself was not very well written, and takes an extremely litigious executive branch to do anything with.
Even if you agreed with the premise (the idea that Standard Oil arose purely through conspiracy is clearly wrong), it's ultimately a very ticky tacky set of definitions and has failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy (do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?)
(The notable exceptions being actual illegal coordination - like was recently uncovered in the egg industry. But these have more to do with price fixing amongst competitors and less with actual Trusts/Monopolies)
The only practical way that countries have tackled monopolies has been to write legislation that specifically puts oversight on that industry.
There is a surprisingly high amount of legislation that seems shockingly poorly written unless one thought that as a feature rather than an bug.
E.g., while the 25th amendment prohibits someone from being elected president more than twice, it does not prohibit succession into presidency, such as by becoming the Speaker of the House (which position does not require one being a US Representative in the House) and President and Vice President resigning. That may seem unlikely or an outlier but on a site like hackers news, I would assume that we would relish the outliers that have bedeviled our software career
I definitely agree that the law was not written with clarity in mind. On the one hand, that gives flexibility to those companies which might try to skirt legislation through technicality, but it bites the other way too, in that the executive needs to be very willing to enforce and defend its enforcement.
I wholly disagree that it failed to achieve anything meaningfully as policy, though. Under Sherman AT&T was split, which, before the baby bells all merged back together to create the present oligopoly, provided a much more competitive landscape for the telecom industry. And who knows what we would have seen if the original Microsoft decision was held up calling for a break up, instead of the neutered decision we saw come out of their appeal.
That's what the article says. But Knight was mostly overturned by Swift. Wikipedia has a decent overview of US antitrust law.[1] The ongoing question is the extent to which courts and the Justice Department should look at the economic implications of sheer size.
If you just grow to being #1 without acquiring your big competitors, that's generally OK in the US. It's competition, not collusion. Google never acquired Yahoo or Bing. Facebook never acquired Myspace or Twitter. So there was no key merger to block.
European Union antitrust policy is based more on the goal of having several major competitors, so there's price competition. An EU study indicates that, below four competitors, the leaders tend to implicitly collude. But in industries with strong network effects, it's hard to have many big competitors.
A modern summary from a law firm: [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
[2] https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20...
> Facebook never acquired Myspace or Twitter
They did acquire Instagram & Whatsapp, which their internal communications show was to block competition of a credible threat despite clever legal maneuvering to have the FTC antitrust case dismissed.
This is also where a lot of it gets ticky tacky. The difference between being anti-competitive and acting competitively against a credible threat is often in the eye of the beholder.
Good to see continuing evidence that the supreme Court continues to be an injust violent tool against the American people, a sad perpetrated of plutocracy.
>”do we actually feel strongly that breaking Microsoft's productivity suite from their OS division was really worth all the effort?”
The antitrust attention distracted Microsoft so badly in the early 2000s that it completely gimped their ability to leverage Internet Explorer’s dominance, thus opening the door for new browsers like Firefox (née Firebird) and Chrome.
So yes, it was actually critical in creating the conditions for an open Web 2.0.
It wasn’t just the US antitrust of the late 1990s, but the EU also had their own legal challenge that targeted IE specifically. This doesn’t get enough credit IMO — the combination was powerful enough to break Microsoft’s hold on the market. Of course SV libertarian types would prefer to write it out of history and say the market sorted this one out on its own.
(Kids these days don’t remember when Mac OS X shipped with Internet Explorer as the only browser…)
I wish we had statutory antitrust mechanisms instead. Get to be a certain size, you have to be a public company. Have a sustained supermajority of the market? You have to file a plan to split up.
The part i've not been able to wrangle is what to do about companies which are internationally monopolies? Couldn't they just pick the winners/losers of local companies and ensure their own supply chain is the one that survives? That seems worse than a national monopoly that is at least HQ'd inside your borders.
This was explored theoretically a few times, but the problem is it's really hard for this not to become extremely anti-consumer.
iPhones dominate the cellphone market? You now have to figure out a way to split the manufacturing and selling of iPhones across multiple different entities. Consumers end up with a handful of worse products that all cost more.
When AT&T was split up, it was just turned into a bunch of smaller regional monopolies that were in a lot of ways worse. It also forced the closure of Bell Labs - one of the most important R&D powerhouses in the US. (Most of these regional monopolies would end up merging back into bigger monopolies over time anyway)
AT&T was much more heavily regulated to operate in the public interest in a way that iPhone manufacturers are not. It's not so clear-cut that the regional monopolies were worse because they were smaller, rather than because they were no longer as strictly regulated.
Companies are basically mini governments. They have leadership (CEO / President), board, etc. However they are they are not democratic. Corporate takeovers happen when an entity with lots of money buys your shares. As such, the rule of the jungle abounds, not the rule of "lets make good products" or "lets have self respect".
One thing I wish being a public company entailed was having a set of internal shares that are distributed only to the people working there, that allowed them to vote on board members / top leadership positions. For example, Amazon currently abuses its delivery staff, but I suspect this is a policy that is not endorsed by the majority of Amazon employees. In a democratic public company, there would be a feedback loop that enables the employees to have a voice.
I see this as a way of having built in regulation, where the government doesn't need to pass laws that are continuously becoming outdated but instead giving the people on the ground the ability to fight for their rights.
I don't see it as useful for small companies, but I agree that a large enough company should be forced to be public + democratic. Going from the rule of the rich to the rule of the people that work there.
> The model that underlies Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 is a step forward in general capabilities. However, during the model’s training, we took steps to limit advances in the specific research capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development. Thus, in relevant areas, including accelerator kernel optimization and improving large language model architectures, Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 perform at about the level of Opus 5.5. Importantly, we ensured that the training changes did not affect related capabilities like agentic coding, hardware development, and traditional AI or machine learning research (including interpretability research). We do not alter these capabilities as the model is being served to users (that is, at inference time). As described in Section 1.5 of the System Card and similarly to previous models, Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 also include transparent fallbacks to Opus 5 for a small set of topics in this domain, including kernel development on certain nonstandard accelerators.
-----
> Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
> Sec. 1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or other- wise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any such contract or engage in any such combination or conspiracy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, at the discretion of the court.
> Sec. 2. Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof; shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
> punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Something tells me that's not gonna do much to dissuade the AI cartels...
That was for a different, less civilized time full of very rich people, so called "robber barons".
I guess we are going back to that era with a different flavour.
Didn't they have the cool mustaches that you can twirl around and look cool?
An oligarch by any other name, something something...
>...shall be punished by fine not exceeding five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding one year, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Wow, I believe violating Section 1201 of the DMCA carries a stiffer penalty these days.
In 2026 dollars, $5,000 1890 would be around $185,131.87. I guess they didn't foresee inflation working against the fine.
> I guess they didn't foresee
Our laws in a nutshell
That quote is from the original 1890 text. The statute has been amended and criminal violations are now felonies with bigger penalties including $100 million fines and 10 years in jail.
The Anti-Trust act makes it illegal for business to conspire to restrict markets.
Anthropic is engaging in some product engineering to level set their offerings against each other.
I'm not sure I am understanding the connection you are trying to make.
The implication of the comment is that Anthropic is limiting the capabilities of their external models to prevent other companies from building models that can compete with Claude, and that this constitutes anticompetitive behavior under the law.
> Anthropic is limiting the capabilities of their external models to prevent other companies from building models that can compete with Claude.
Uhhhh... that seems like quite a logical leap. "The only reason Apple doesn't release a faster phone is so other companies can't copy it."
Antitrust generally does not compel companies to make product lineup decisions, especially if the industry itself is acting quite competitively.
1. Anthropic is not coordinating with competitors so there's no "conspiracy"
2. Anthropic doesn't have much market power. The competition is intense.
3. Anthropic doesn't have a legal requirement to provide it's strongest internal model to competitors.
Please add a closing parenthesis. Its absence is driving this Scheme hacker bananas.