For whom? Certainly not for consumers, which are the only people that antitrust regulations are meant to protect. The integrated ecosystem is the point. That's why Apple commands such enormous premium over their competitors.
It helps consumers until it doesn’t. If we follow your logic back to the day, every company would be owned by rail or our economy would look like SK where half the gdp is Samsung.
Isn't antitrust law supposed to protect something you can't see or touch: fair competition. Fair competition should be protected. Lack of competition is bad.
> Although consolidation did advance the large-scale production and distribution of oil products, many critics believed that the resulting concentration of economic power was becoming excessive. In 1906 the U.S. government brought suit against Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890; in 1911 the New Jersey company was ordered to divest itself of its major holdings—33 companies in all.
Yes it became bad for consumers and they were broken up. My point is that if you want a shot at calling in antitrust regulations on Apple (you know, potentially destroying billions of other-peoples’-dollars), you have to prove not that they’re crushing their competition but that 1) they’re doing so unfairly and 2) with negative outcomes for consumers.
> By 1874, his share of the petroleum market jumped to 25 percent, and by 1880 it skyrocketed to about 85 percent. Meanwhile, the price of oil plummeted from 30 cents per gallon in 1869 to eight cents in 1885. Put simply, Rockefeller increased production and lowered prices while creating thousands of well-paid jobs along the way (he usually paid his workers significantly more than his competition did). His business was a model of free-market efficiency.
> But neither his competitors nor the US Supreme Court seemed to take note. In 1911, the court declared Standard Oil a monopoly and ordered its breakup. Revealingly, as scholars have noted, the court made no mention of either predatory pricing or withholding production, as monopoly theory maintains. In fact, economist John S. McGee reviewed over 11,000 pages of trial testimony, including the charges brought by Standard Oil’s competitors. Publishing his findings in the Journal of Law and Economics, he concluded that there was “little to no evidence” of wrongdoing, adding that “Standard Oil did not use predatory price cutting to acquire or keep monopoly power."
