My understanding of "breaking up" is the artificial creation of competition when organic competition cannot come to fruition on its own.
I'd also like to point you to Clay Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. One of the parts is that well run companies while doing everything optimally will lead themselves to destruction because they will laugh and scoff at the idea of being involved at the lower-end market brought on by new technologies.
Then theres also the internal resistance within the company. Imagine trying to staff up a small team to checkout a possible new technology to do X. No rational manager will want to take that opportunity as it is clearly a fool's errand. They'd rather stay and be the manager for the profit generating center, rather than go pursue some foolish idea that clearly will never go anywhere.
So what you end up with is many, many reasons why the best companies miss the ball on where the market was moving to in an obvious (in hindsight) way.
And for publicly-owned companies, resisting is rarely feasible because a majority of shareholders will find it to be a risky proposition (and a majority may have invested in hopes of a takeover, anyway.)
It is rare for a startup to grow large enough to challenge an entrenched incumbent in a large market without taking on a majority of investors who are not necessarily committed to fighting for independence.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/3/29/15112314/amazon-shutting-do...
One way to do this would be to require public APIs, so that competitors can make rival designs/experiences.
For example, if Amazon uses its monopoly to only show its own products in the first page of search results, even when they cost more or have worse reviews, then a competitor could build an interface that does better.
Also, I don’t think there is much value add if companies are just reverse engineering the incumbent. If Google allows another company to get its search results easily to copy search, did the world improve?
Google’s moat was partially disrupted by Facebook, a closed network, and mobile/mobile apps.
Your last example has occurred for a number of years with shelf space at grocery stores and pharmacies. The CVS branded Advil is cheaper, and CPG companies can pay to get the best shelf space.
Isn't the general idea behind breaking them up that in their current state, these companies are near monopolies and make it impossible for new competition to thrive? Even more so because when they did have competition in the past (e.g. Facebook with Instagram), they just acquired them?
I wonder if regulators were not fully aware of this when that merger was happening -- I think Ben Thompson at Stratechery hinted at this in an article some time ago.
Type 1) Very high costs
You are free to build a competitor to Google Search. No one has the resources needed to build it or they don't think it's a good way to spend their resources if they do have them.
Type 2) The nature of the product renders competition difficult
You are free to compete with Facebook. Unfortunately, it's naturally a winner-take-all market because the more users you have, the more each user gets out of the product.
Type 3) The company behaves unfairly
You are not free to compete.
This is the one that most people think of most of the time when they say monopolies are bad. Once you have power, you take actions to maintain your power and crush newcomers.
Yeah, as if you can build an ecosystem as big as Apple from scratch just on the premise of selling music and nothing else. Some people are just out of touch with reality. Microsoft, with far more resources, tried with Windows Phone and it failed.
Instead the hard stuff gets commoditized over time.
Photolithography and operating systems are hard, but now social networking is where the money is at.