Not true. Look at the market for meat. There are lots of farmers, a small number (really three or four) processors (who appear to carve up the national market into non overlapping regions) and then a large number of retail customers.

To me that looks like an actual antitrust violation but the DoJ and FTC aren’t investigating bc they are obsessing about “big tech” uselessly and bringing bad cases they are going to lose!

If you want your regulators to actually do something about a lack of competition in the US economy (which they really should be doing!) there are a ton of markets worth investigating before they waste their time on this loser of a case.

FTC/DOJ not investigating doesn't mean this isn't a flagrant monopoly that would be prosecuted by a non-corrupt FTC/DOJ

I think you should really delve deeper into Stoller’s work because he covers all these different industries on a regular basis. I remember the meat story for some reason as well.

But, hey, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s a bad case being done for show. Slap on the wrist, back to business as usual sort of deal.

So the meat market is generally pretty healthy with an oligopoly at one stage of the supply chain? That actually sounds a lot better than I thought the meat market was. "Carving up" like that is also not a big problem unless they collude to do it, and it's a natural thing for an oligopoly market to do: each of the companies focuses on the niche they are best-equipped to serve, keeping in mind that their competition can come in if they get too greedy.

It's also a lot better than the ads market is, with literally one dominant player that monopolizes all stages of the supply chain. This is literally what Standard Oil did, controlling the wells, the refineries, and the distribution railroads to shut out competitors.

If you look at financial exchanges, there's a very good reason for the brokers and exchange to all be different companies.