The Justice Department wants to investigate the recently announced
Microsoft
-
Yahoo
deal, which will combine their search businesses. This comes as no surprise. But Justice busy-bodying here underscores a fault. Antitrust efforts serve no public good.
Earth to Washington--in free markets, monopolies are short lived. Free markets are also more efficient antitrust enforcers than Washington ever could be. The list of once-mighty "monopolies" brought low by market forces is a long one.
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Back in the 1950s and '60s,
General Motors
suppressed sales to avoid an antitrust suit. Today, GM exists only because it received $70 billion from Uncle Sam.
IBM
fought antitrust suits because of its mainframe computer dominance. But it nearly went broke in the '90s, thanks to minicomputers and PC networks.
Xerox
invented the copier market, but firms like
Canon
and
Ricoh
ate away at it via cheap, small machines. Xerox ended up at death's door before being rescued by ex-CEO
Anne
Mulcahy
Anne Mulcahy
.
In the
Microsoft
-
Yahoo
case, even a pro-forma investigation is absurd.
Google
dominates the search market with a 65% share. Worse still, Microsoft is shaking things up not through monopolistic practices, but through innovation. Its Bing search engine has made Google shape up its own efforts. That's the way markets work. Justice simply needs to learn this.
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