Do Amazon and Google lock out competition?

Anti-monopoly casesattdjftc have been known to reshape corporate America. In 1984 &’s telephone network was found to have excluded competing firms. The company was controversially broken up in a move that ultimately led to a boom in innovation among its rivals. Meanwhile, a case against Microsoft in 1998 may have kept the door open for Google’s subsequent rise. Microsoft had bundled together its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system, and made other browsers more difficult to install. Some business historians think the case, by stopping this practice, made life easier for new browsers. It may also have distracted Microsoft from developing its own search engine.Today, two big cases could redefine the limits of monopolies in the internet age. On September 12th America’s Department of Justice (o) began its court battle against Google over the firm’s deals to obtain default status on phones and browsers. On September 26th the Federal Trade Commission (), chaired by Lina Khan, sued Amazon for allegedly penalising third-party sellers that offered lower prices on other sites, among other harmful practices. In both cases, the government thinks the tech giants are so dominant that their attempts to preserve market power are suspect. This raises a question: what counts as anticompetitive?