Mika folded the yellowed page of the pamphlet and looked out over the river, where cranes hunched like watchful giants. The pamphlet—an old classroom handout—had printed in blunt type the argument she’d been assigned to dismantle: “A monopoly is legitimate as long as it is the result of competition. The denial of monopolies leads to the denial of free competition, and therefore cannot be permitted.” It sounded tidy, almost inevitable, the kind of slogan that could live on a bumper sticker and feel profound.
But Mika was not in the business of slogans. She wrote about markets the way some people collect fossils: to understand what lay beneath the surface. She remembered the classroom case that cracked the doctrine into pieces—the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil, where the U.S. Supreme Court held that buildup to monopoly could be the product of excluded rivals and secret deals, not pure, benevolent superiority. The Court’s remedy—dismantling a behemoth into many companies—was a blunt but lasting reminder that how a market concentration forms matters as much as how big it is.
On the tram home, she read a thread from a lawyer in Brussels. The European Union, she learned, had translated that lesson into a new instrument for digital times: the Digital Markets Act. Instead of waiting for monopolies to entrench themselves through years of exclusion, the DMA pre-designates certain platforms as “gatekeepers” and imposes ex-ante duties—limits meant to stop exclusion before it ossifies. The EU had already listed the big players—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft—as gatekeepers in 2023, and regulators kept testing the boundaries of who qualifies. The point was clear: markets with powerful network effects and unavoidable intermediation need rules that treat structure and conduct differently than old-school antitrust did.
Mika’s phone buzzed with another alert: a U.S. court had last year concluded that a dominant search engine had unlawfully maintained its monopoly through exclusionary contracts and placement deals—spending billions to secure default status on phones and browsers. Judges and policymakers were no longer content to say “a good product wins”; they were scrutinizing the deals that made that product the only realistic choice for most users. The ruling rippled like a stone in a still pond: enforcement could, in some regimes, lead to remedies ranging from behavioral restraints to structural change.
In Beijing she found another rehearsal of the same theme. Regulators had not ignored the tech giants there: a high-profile penalty against a major e-commerce platform in 2021 and a multi-year “rectification” process afterward showed that the state too could rebalance markets when dominant platforms coerced merchants or blocked rivals. Different legal cultures produced different tools, but the core tension remained universal—how to let firms grow and innovate while preventing them from stealing the very competition that created them.
That night, over noodle soup, Mika argued with her friend Daichi, who still liked the pamphlet’s neat logic. “Let the market pick the winner,” he said. “If someone wins fairly, it’s their right.”
Mika sipped her broth. “But what does ‘fairly’ mean when the playing field is rigged without anyone noticing? When a company pays to be the default, or ties a critical service to an operating system, or uses data from one product to crush entrants in another, the result looks like competition but smells like foreclosure.” She sketched an outline: rule of reason, exclusionary practices, predatory pricing, tying, essential facilities. Policies, she said, follow from diagnosis: if dominance comes from superior product and low prices, it rewards innovation; if it comes from deliberate exclusion, it destroys the market’s future.
She pulled another phrase from the economic texts she loved—creative destruction. Schumpeter had celebrated the relentless churn where new firms replace old ones; innovation rose from the wreckage. But that churn depended on the possibility of entry. When barriers rose—insurmountable data hoarding, platform lock-in, or chokehold distribution arrangements—creative destruction stalled. A monopoly that looks like the “result of competition” can actually be the graveyard of future competitors.
Mika imagined two worlds. In one, markets were left entirely to after-the-fact litigation: you get a monopolist, someone sues in ten years, and a court tries to unmake a market that has already rerouted value, employment and supply chains. In the other, regulators combined ex-ante rules for structurally sensitive sectors (like gatekeeper platforms), robust merger review, and targeted remedies—behavioral or structural—when firms used exclusion rather than better service to win. The second world was messy and bureaucratic, but it preserved the possibility that the next startup could scale without being crushed before finding its customers.
Her pieces of evidence—Standard Oil, the DMA, the recent U.S. litigation, China’s fines—were not unanimous proof that any single remedy was always right. They were, instead, case studies that showed a simple truth: legitimacy depends on process. A monopoly that emerges because it made markets more efficient, reduced costs, and still allowed rivals to compete likely earns social legitimacy (and sometimes legal protection). A monopoly that solidifies by rent-seeking, foreclosure, or by making itself indispensable through self-preferencing undermines the very competition that supposedly justified its dominance.
At the end of the week she wrote the column. She began with the pamphlet’s slogan, then rehearsed the history and the modern instruments that had sprouted to answer it: judicial ruptures that split trusts, regulatory acts that preemptively manage gatekeepers, and cross-jurisdictional enforcement that reminded firms there was no single, global permit to dominate. She wove in the specialized vocabulary—network effects, essential facilities doctrine, ex-ante vs. ex-post regulation, behavioral versus structural remedies—so readers could see the levers by which markets are kept honest.
Her concluding image was simple: competition as a garden. If you let one vine run wild, it will steal light and soil. Sometimes you prune; sometimes you rearrange trellises; sometimes you uproot and replant. The gardener’s choices are judged not by ideology but by results: did the garden produce variety, resilience and room for new seedlings? If it did, then a large plant could be a treasure. If it didn’t—if the large plant had become a fence that kept others out—then no amount of mythology about “result of competition” could make its rule legitimate.
She hit send. A moment later, comments came in—some defensive, some curious. The debate would continue, as it always had: law, economics, history and the daily mechanics of markets arguing over what “competition” really meant. Mika smiled. The conversation was, she thought, proof that competition still existed—messy, noisy, and very much alive.
All names of people and organizations appearing in this story are pseudonyms
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