by eesmith | 2026-02-28 20:50:32+00:00
What is your goal here?

Do you understand what malfist wrote by "near monopoly power", and agree that it's a correct description of California's anti-trust lawsuit?

If not, what do you not understand?

As to your new set of questions, do you mean my personal beliefs, or do you mean the process by which the courts determine if an organization is abusing monopoly power, or to you mean an actual court decision? I'll answer all three.

Personally, yes, these companies abuse their near monopoly power. The failure to enforce the Robinson–Patman Act, the de-fanging of the FTC and consumer protection agencies, and the post-Borkian re-casting of antitrust law to "consumer welfare", has, IMHO, devastated the American free market resulting in a centralized command economy dominated by a handful of megacorporations.

Nor am I alone in this belief. It is not hard to find articles like "Walmart’s Monopolization of Local Grocery Markets" at https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/walmarts-monop... which, among other things, points out how the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department has, since the 1960s, greatly raised the threshold for what "highly concentrated" market capture means, and WalMart is extreme even by that definition.

The legal process is to identify the relevant market. This can neither be too narrow - the market for "RC Cola" is not "those who buy RC Cola but also includes other colas - nor too large -- RC Cola is not really interchangeable with milk, even though both are liquids which people drink.

If 99% of the people drink RC Cola, that could be because they love the taste, and are willing to pay more for it. (This is the premise of the Borkian view that monopolies are a direct and visible expression of consumer choice.) The anti-trust case must therefore also show there was abuse of its market position. That is what California's complaint does by describing many cases of third-party sellers unwilling to offer lower prices elsewhere, for fear of retaliation by Amazon. (The "consumer welfare" interpretation wrongly, IMO, rejects the idea that vendor concerns like this are part of antitrust law.)

There's probably more, but I'm a programmer, not a lawyer. I only know about these details because of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit and commentary about the influence of Lina Khan on the FTC.

As for legal decisions, like I said, the last 40 years or so have chiseled away at antitrust law. So we have the FTC under Lina Kahn bringing up an anti-trust case, https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2025/12/18/how-w... :

"A newly unredacted FTC complaint shows that PepsiCo and Walmart worked together to rig grocery pricing, drive up pricing at competitors and protect Walmart’s dominance. Internal PepsiCo documents reveal a coordinated strategy to give Walmart better wholesale prices, penalize independent and regional grocers that tried to lower their prices and preserve Walmart’s “price gap” by pushing rivals’ shelf prices up."

but then having it dropped voluntarily by the Trump/Ferguson FTC.

Which is why these sorts of things are now taken up on state courts, like California for Amazon, or New York (see Gelbspan v. Pepsico and Walmart at https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/mopabybynva/...). That does use the word "monopoly" and "monopolist", and describes the SSNIP test as the Hypothetical Monopoly Test used to determine if the relevant market is well-defined.

So if you are looking for actual court cases which have determined this, you either haven't been paying attention to the topic, or you are a willing supporter of the Chicago School and the billionaire class which gain power by promoting it.