> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Charles Brown
>
> Nathan,
>
> Isn't anti-trust law pretty much of a phony/figleaf type of thing ?
Without going to theories of antitrust enforcement - and hell that is major area for legal realism since any "theory" is pretty much ideological debate - antitrust is one of the few areas where the law gets into actual discussions of corporate governance and popular control. Because practically everything else in corporate law happens in Delaware, antitrust is about the only place in the law where issues of corporate governance and non-shareholder interests in mergers gets any role.
It's a pathetic foothold for those issues, since lefties end up mouthing all this pro-market rhetoric to use it, but the ideological assault on antitrust has gone hand-in-hand with the assault on all kinds of corporate regulation.
One of the reasons I spent so much time working on the Microsoft issue -- aside from the desire to eat at the time -- was that all the legal arguments for antitrust enforcement were the same arguments implying the need for general social regulation of cybertechnology against the pure libertarian position that is so popular.
In many ways in telecom we've had the worst of all worlds in regards to antitrust-- we had the Reagan White House sign off on breaking up AT&T, which was a political maneuver to end regulation of phone service, even as the replacement companies have merged and plundered public assets with little public regulation. The result has been soaring rates for basic service and little or no expansion of the quality of service for most phone users. Despite the promises of high bandwidth service, it has been deployed in remarkably few areas largely because the regulatory structure has encouraging cream-skimming of the richest customers with little way for common carriers to recoup long-term investments for lower income users.
The end result is that the only way to get such broadband service is if we end up with a giant monstrosity like AOL-TimeWarner which through monopoly control on content can recoup its investments-- the sad ideological result of all this pro-business regulation and merger.
-- Nathan Newman