Monopolies In The Antitrust Industry

American Monopolies
This short article by Douglas A. McIntyre paints a very good picture of how many of the American Technologies companies are pure monopolies within this industry. McIntyre opens this article by saying “A monopoly is either what the government says it is or what a dominant company’s competitors claim. The Governments opinion is the only one that counts….” (McIntyre, 2012). McIntyre then mentioned that there was this Act that prohibits businesses from activities that are found to be anticompetitive that is called the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. After seeing this, I was curious of what was the true meaning behind this Act and after a few searches I found that according to Wikipedia, “The Sherman Antitrust Act is a landmark
It was the first federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies, and today still forms the basis for most antitrust litigation by the United States federal government.” (Wikipedia 2013). After learning that such Act is in place, I now see why there are not very many true monopolies, meaning that they own 100% of the market and how the government has a say in how companies are ran. In my opinion, I honestly feel that is a very beneficial law to have in the books because it gives an entrepreneur or another business a fair chance at entering a chosen market. But on the other hand, it’d only be smart to enter a market that you honestly feel you have a chance to survive in, or you’d only be setting yourself up for failure. Anyhow, McIntyre goes on to provide a list called the “New Generation of American Monopolies” which is a list of all the biggest companies in the technology industry that control the markets in their respective produce. Not to my surprise of the many big names on this list, in which most reside in the Silicon Valley like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, Apple and even Paypal. Most of these are more of an Oligopoly, meaning they share the market, except for one that was of a surprise to me which was Sirius XM satellite radio simply for the fact that this company was the only true monopoly
But maybe I didn’t think of this because they have absolutely zero competition. After a little more research on wikipedia, I found that back in the early 2000’s there was a little competition between two different satellite companies, XM and Sirius, but due to the money that it takes to keep satellites in orbit, the two realized that the only way they’d both survive was to merge, so in 2007 they did (Wikipedia). I truly found this article really interesting because it was broke down into each product,(i.e. search engine, operations system, social media sites, digital video streaming, microchips, tablet computer and even e-readers) and then explained why each of the top companies where so dominant. Some were there because of the sheer size of their company and others made it just because they made a better produce which made for a higher demand of that produce in which pinched out the competition. To just give a few of the examples, Google controls 90.1% of the search engine market over Yahoo and Bing, Microsoft controls 89.7% of the windows operating systems over Mac OS X and Linux, Intel controls 80.3% of the microchips market over AMD, and Apple iPad controls 73% of the market over