Homer: You see, Lisa, your mother has this crazy idea that gambling is wrong. Even though they say it’s okay in the Bible.
Lisa: Really? Where?
Homer: Uh, somewhere in the back.
Okay so I Googled and in 1971 the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was signed into law which (among other things) put caps on campaign contributions. There were loopholes though which could be exploited, such as “soft money” contributions which were not made to individual candidates but instead went to political parties to influence certain races. In 2002, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (or BCRA, also known as the “McCain-Feingold Act”) was put into law which tried to stop that practice. Nothing of note happened in the “late '80s”, and there was no legislation passed in an attempt to reform campaign financing between 1971 (FECA) and 2002 (BCRA).
The only part of @Crankyhillbilly’s screed which has any fact to it is the mention of 2010, which is when two separate court decisions (Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNOW.org v. FEC) worked to declare that campaign finance limits were unconstitutional as they were being enforced at the time. The former declared that it was a free speech violation to deny organizations from running electioneering communications if they accept corporate or union money. Shortly afterward, the latter case declared that independent organizations not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign cannot be forced to limit contributions, which led to the rise of “Super PACs”. So while the previous campaign finance reform laws weren’t completely undone, this gave a loophole the size of Texas which effectively allowed people (specifically corporations and unions) to indirectly fund elections without limit, and that’s pretty much where we are at today.
Not quite that simple. Both Rockefeller and the railroad magnates used a variety of techniques, some of which were illegal then and most of which were made illegal later, to destroy their competition so as to make them easy to absorb. Interestingly, their techniques differed greatly in the two industries. Rockefeller undercut prices, got the railroads to give him illegal rebates, and threatened buyers. Railroads used watered stock to inflate valuations, charged favored users different prices, and ran substandard cars that caused many accidents. Both, however, bribed state legislatures.
The Age of Trusts was short but intense. More than 300 industries consolidated into trusts from about 1882-1910. The abuses from the trusts were so overwhelming that because of crusading journalists that Roosevelt called “muckrakers” even the politicians and courts were shamed into taking action.
The loss of monopoly did not imply a loss of corporate control over politicians. That just gave the pols more hands to offer them money. The Republican Party billed itself as the party of business (Calvin Coolidge: “the chief business of the American people is business”) and held the presidency and Congress throughout the boom decades of the twenties.
FDR started the process of reducing corporate domination when the Depression caused a huge loss of confidence in business but it took WWII and the labor peace that it generated after to alter the historic lack of balance. Ironically, though, the rise of the military industrial complex in the fifties brought back the relationship. Today military industries are strategically sited in every Congressional district, making it nearly impossible to get any cuts in military spending through Congress. The fingers in the pockets are more subtle but no less powerful.
So the railroad company, oil company or steel company where not monopolies they where trusts and using unfair business practices and illegal practice to hurt other companies?
The difference being that a monopoly is a single company that controls a market while a trust is a group of companies that work together to control a market.
Well some people say sugar, tobacco and meat-packing companies had a monopoly or oligopoly. Or it was more oligopoly.
I do not know if it just US culture or religion or may be propaganda or all three but in the US most conservatives do not believe there was in the past monopoly or even today companies that have a monopoly. And even most liberals do not seem to talk about this subject.
And seem to think small government and free market is the best.
True one-corporation monopolies almost never exist in the unregulated market. Nor do they need to.
Even during the trusts, there were always small local or niche companies that weren’t worth the bother to acquire. Nevertheless, the trust controlled the market and prevented other major challengers from entering. That Investopedia article is a good place to start. (Except for the incorrect claim about Microsoft.)
The trusts were monopolies not oligopolies. If two or more equal businesses existed they merged to form a trust.
A massive, overbearing government that controls the market is a bad thing, so there is a bit of truth to that. But so is a government neutered and subservient to corporations and other large private entities, and an unregulated market will not benefit the people, despite the wishes of the right wing.
Also, you have to remember that occasionally in the period between 1865 and 1910 the robber barons bailed the government out of sticky situations by lending it money or buying bonds when needed …
JP Morgan did it by himself at least twice and any major financial decision was run by him for input so often he became very contemptuous of any elected official …
Microsoft would be monopoly because businesses, companies, corporations and governments use Microsoft and MS office. Every computer you buy comes with windows and you got no other choice.
With Apple you limited on the hardware and Apple only makes a small amount of market shares, Apple does not even try to make gaming computers and so no game developers bother making games to run on that OS, and Apple does not even try to make businesses computers to try to get market shares for businesses. It mostly computer for college kids and people into music and art. And now a lot of people into music and art are switching over to windows.
If Apple where to sale Mac OS X to companies like HP,Acer and Dell so on, than may be it may change being the two players like MS and Apple.
Linux is too much a niche and spotting with hardware support. And unless you really good at computers or more computer geek most people will be afraid trying to install linux that it may not get installed properly or you may get black screen at boot up. So unless you have friend or family member that uses Linux and can install it for you and help you if you run into problem you will put it of installing it.
When comes to cell phone companies today there is only like 4 companies Verizon ,AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint in the US and when comes to your ISP like broadband there is like only 4 in the US today. These would be like oligopolies.
When comes to who makes a GPU today it is only AMD and nvidia it is oligopolies same thing who makes CPU it is only intel and AMD to choose from.
Where Google is becoming a monopoly today because google is not just a search engine but service giving you photo storage, google docts, google sheets, gmail, calendar, cloud storage, maps so on , where the likes of Yahoo, bing and DuckDuckGo do not have this as they just a search engines.
So now it requires millions and millions of dollars to invest in infrastructure to just set up to see if you can compete with Google.
Youtube is a monopoly because there no other web site like youtube and because of the millions of TB storage needed for the videos and millions of servers it needs billions and billions of dollars to invest in infrastructure just set up to see if you can compete with youtube.
As for the Pharmaceutical companies I hear there is only like 3 or 4 in the US now.
And the gas company , water company and electrical company you lucky to have three to choose from today.
Wikipedia is monopoly because there is no other web site like it not even one.
So than the problem is these monopolies and oligopolies have been problem all long and getting worse now.
Watch a clip from Star Trek on vimeo.org Star Trek (2009) on Vimeo
When I was a kid, there was one phone company - Ma Bell. You used their phones or you had no phone.
Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Scholarpedia. Citizendium. MSN Encarta. Infoplease.
Is it a monopoly if it’s completely free?
There are many encyclopedias on and off the web. There are also many wikis on the web.
You should probably step away and learn a little bit of Internet history.
Forget history, even today Yahoo has mail with a calendar (I still have a few accounts), has its own maps, does news, has photos (aka Flickr)… Everything that was mentioned that Google does, so does Yahoo. This is just ignorance of what Yahoo is. Now, it’s also true that once Yahoo was bigger; I remember it being the main search engine while Google was an upstart. But either way there’s a fundamental lack of knowledge behind this argument.
To have service like google requires huge investment and hundreds of servers. Most millionaires don’t have money to burn to see if there pet project will go under or stay afloat.
The market pick the three empires and it was google.
Some of that also could be leadership problems. Where yahoo groups and Microsoft clubs may been a big hit in the 90s and 2000s but became old later when social media came out.
Where facebook and twitter over took the format of yahoo groups and clubs of way of communicating today.
Well had yahoo had a crystal ball that could see the future yahoo would got some thing like facebook and twitter before those companies got there and put money into maps and cloud storage.
What does this mean?
There are many search engines but the three largest are Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. The market picked Google.
It was not just a search engine they also had other interesting things like MSN news, clubs, chat, photos, message board, messenger app, and finance and same with Yahoo.
At time it was two big players yahoo and MSN than Google came and took over.
There was also Lycos, AOL, Excite in the 90s but not has big as Yahoo and MSN.
Today Yahoo and Bing are still powerful having services similar to Google.
I use to use Yahoo and MSN.
Well one of major problems with Microsoft is they are always rebranding and starting new services. The problem is out side of office and windows Microsoft has ADHD brain.
If outlook, bing search, microsoft browser and Skype does not do well they will shut it down and make similar product and call it some thing else. This alienate users. I cannot keep track of Microsoft products as they always rebranding it and calling it different names.
The Microsoft map is unfinished product. When it came to bird eye view of cities Microsoft had it before Google.
But they started with only a handful of major cities and never really put more money into the project to get people to move over there.
The bing map was no where as good as Google or Apple maps because it had feel of unfinished product.
Microsoft shut down MSN groups and clubs. Because the market proved social media over clubs and groups is want people want.
And Yahoo had some good projects but never updated it and it got old. Also yahoo just wanted to keep doing same thing over and over where Google had new ideas for the future.
If Microsoft or Yahoo had street view and bird eye like Apple or Google earth than I would may be use it than Google earth.
If yahoo or some company had docs, sheets and powerpoint like google than I would use it than google
If some company had email similar to Gmail than I would use it.
You didn’t actually look into that history that I recommended, did you?
I’m out.