> One could argue that this is exactly the point in the cycle when antitrust should start being used. Any earlier and you preemptively regulate.

Antitrust is about anti-competitive practices, like vendor lock-in, tying, collusion, mergers etc. These are practices non-monopolies use to establish a monopoly. Waiting until there is already a monopoly is too late, and the modern focus on "monopolies" is itself being used as a dodge by large companies, because a market with only two or three competitors is already concentrated enough to hold together a cartel.

Moreover, antitrust isn't like other regulations. You typically don't have to impose any compliance burden ahead of time, instead you declare contracts in restraint of trade to be void and prefer remedies in the form of court orders rather than damages. So for example, if a company (regardless of size) is abusing the DMCA or imposing contractual terms to prevent buyers from installing apps on devices the company sold, that's anti-competitive and no court should enforce the contract, and a customer should be able to sue them not for damages but for a patch to allow them to run their own code.

This isn't a problem for new markets because you're not bankrupting the company if they get it wrong or imposing penalties for not hiring a lawyer, you're just preventing the anti-competitive practice from being effective by ordering it to stop the first time anyone raises the objection.

> I'd have gone with rent-instead-of-own and converting purchases into platform subscriptions.

That's ebook licensing.

> But point being that the original law was against the wishes of the largest players in that sector.

The first sale doctrine was originally created by the courts rather than the legislature.

> I'd say the incumbents were pretty upset about that, considering Southwest spent the first 3 years of its existence in court...

But isn't that the point? The incumbents liked it better when the regulators were captured by the industry and imposing regulations at their behest. When those regulations were removed, they sued and got upset.

> I'm sure old ATT would have something to say about that...

Are you kidding? That's how they got their monopoly to begin with. The original phone network was a thousand companies each running their own wires across the city. Ma Bell took a picture of the rat's nest of cables and said "something must be done" and had their monopoly enshrined into the law. And many of those laws persist even after the company was broken up.

> What's your argument?

The regulators are so captured that the thing they're prohibiting is safety testing because the large incumbents neither want to pay for the testing nor want their competitors to be able to advertise having done it when they won't. It's proof that the regulators are beholden to the industry, quod erat demonstrandum.

> You're suggesting the NHTSA solve the US housing market?

I'm suggesting that the industry captures the relevant regulators. NHTSA does things like require safety equipment customers would have demanded from major car companies regardless. This has minimal cost to the large incumbents and in fact helps them by making it more expensive to start a new car company, because crash testing and certification is a negligible incremental cost for a company making millions of cars but a significant fixed cost for a small manufacturer.

Meanwhile allowing more people to live in areas where they don't need cars would actually cause problems for them, so they make sure national policy is to fund highways and not fund high-density market-rate housing construction.

> And let me tell you, automakers aren't thrilled about CAFE standards...

Which is why they had them neutered. Notice how more than half the "cars" people drive are actually trucks and SUVs? Because they have a lower efficiency requirement.

> If your point is that the EPA is under-matched against some of the largest companies on the planet, yes.

The problem is that those are the ones they need to be effective against, because those are the ones operating at scale.

Meanwhile they impose rules with high compliance costs on smaller companies, which is what those larger companies want.

Moreover, the issue is here is not "should regulations exist" -- you need to prohibit major sources of pollution, there is no way around it. Dumping mercury in the river is bad. The issue is that you shouldn't just create a regulatory agency with the power to continuously create new rules that accumulate but never expire, with no capacity for them to be challenged on the basis of e.g. efficacy or cost/benefit ratio. Which is what we've been doing.

> That's the way the world works.

That's the way politics works, which is the point -- politics ruins everything it touches and therefore should prudently be restrained from touching many things.

> If there weren't fishing quotas, companies would happily deplete fisheries as quickly as they could get them on the boat.

If you took a vote exclusively of fishing companies, do you think they would favor some quota system or no quota system? Regardless of what they would do if there were no quotas, they are not lobbying for the thing they know would put them out of business in a year.