Competition is found all throughout nature. Without competition, it’s reasonably safe to say that organisms wouldn’t have evolved over the years – in other words, that means we wouldn’t be here!
Just like its wide-ranging application in nature, competition is an important part of business. For example, if there’s only one business in the pineapple market, the business could sell pineapples for $10 per unit and still expect to sell them because nobody else is selling them. However, if there are five competitors to that one pineapple-selling business, the competitors would lower their prices to beef up sales. The price of pineapples in this market would ultimately fall to a level at which competitors could generate a slight profit from their sale, though nowhere near as much as if there were only one competitor in the field.
If the aforementioned scenario were true in the United States, the federal government would likely find the sole pineapple market’s competitor in violation of what are known as antitrust laws, or laws that promote competition and keep American consumers from getting screwed over as a result of unchecked unfair business practices.
According to a recent statement from the United States Department of Justice’s Makan Delrahim, the agency’s Assistant Attorney General for its Antitrust Division, the agency has joined heads with state-level attorneys general from around the nation to dig into whether, in fact, tech giants such as Google are muting the level of competition in the tech industry. Delrahim’s statement came out earlier today, on Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2019.
Delrahim shared the aforementioned sentiment at a Colorado-based conference held by the Tech Policy Institute while he was being interviewed.
The day before, on Monday, Aug. 19, The Wall Street Journal shared that a number of U.S. states would be joining hands and entering into a full-fledged investigation into whether antitrust laws are being broken in the tech sector. This investigation hasn’t been announced yet – and that’s if it ends up being announced – though experts believe it will be formally declared toward the end of this month, or roughly a week-and-a-half from now.
The Federal Trade Commission is already peering into whether Facebook is guilty of breaking antitrust laws. Joe Simons, the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, an agency under the Department of Commerce, shared yesterday that this investigation could be done at some point next year, though it could run on into 2021.
