Similarly, Securities and Exchange Commission chief Arthur Levitt Jr. is worried about the Big Six accounting and consulting firms melding themselves into the Big Four. Those mergers will be reviewed by Justice. In the view of the new trustbusters, technology and consolidation have created an interlinked economy that behaves differently from the one dominated by the Rockefellers or the Vanderbilts. Klein appears to accept the argument that an economy honeycombed by computers and fiber optics can create harmful monopolies even when prices are moving down. In this era, the key worry is not that robber barons will eventually gouge consumers but rather that digital monopolists will dominate a technology chain in a way that deters rivals and ultimately damps down the pace of innovation.
Many economists say that modern industries tend naturally toward dominant standards.
Once the VHS video format gained a slight edge over Beta, it soon had an overwhelming edge, since consumers and producers both gravitated to the system most other people were using. The same has held true of the Windows operating system in competing against Apple. The key antitrust concern is whether a company that controls such a standard can in the long run keep competitors from arising even in allied fields. When you get an installed base, like the Windows base, it's hard for people to penetrate that monopoly. We want to make sure the market remains fully open.