> The model breakup for antitrust people was the breakup of Standard Oil, and the owners (the Rockefellers) were richer after it was broken up, and still had control. Exxon (Standard Oil New Jersey) is still the largest oil company.

This happened over 100 years ago and does not reflect contemporary judgement. Furthermore the court has firmly indicated its desire to break from all but the aesthetics of jurisprudence—I see no reason why the court might be bound from by judgements when it's rejected the concept of any binding language outside of literal statute.

> Being political, antitrust enforcement is often largely a ritual to display for the public when corruption has become too obvious for anyone sane to deny.

Most political actions are rituals designed to fend off the public from interference with the state.

>It has no explicit goal (except benefit to the consumer, defined arbitrarily), so it can't actually do anything, because officially nothing is wrong other than "market manipulation" that "harms the consumer."

Yes, we have pathetically weak anti-trust laws, particularly when statute does not bind the court to determine what constitutes anti-consumer behavior. Perhaps we should begin with abandoning the concept of the "consumer", who is a ridiculously stupid entity only designed to buy from a market with no other attributes. Perhaps we should embrace the concept of the "citizen" again.

Presumably the public will either demand stronger protections or suffer further.

> It's like forcing a rich guy to keep his money in two different wallets. With people making a living arguing about whether two wallets are enough, or should it be three, or even (as argued by dangerous radicals far outside of the mainstream) ten wallets?

Yes, partial satisfaction of public demands do not make rational sense. These make political sense, though, in the fact that states tend to comply with demands only insofar as the public is satisfied enough to stop bothering the politicians.

> The main reason antitrust should be pursued far more aggressively is because there is no harm to the owners other than that their ability to manipulate the market through anti-competitive means (something that they claim not to have anyway) is weakened. It's really just paperwork.

Anti-trust should be pursued more aggressively because this tactic seem to produce better environments for humans to live in. "anti-trust" is certainly already narrowly defined to only pursue narrow private behaviors, but it just as certainly has no rational basis to be confined to such terms. We could easily define it in terms of harms to humans in betrayal of the idea of an actually competitive market. It certainly produces a higher cost for the government to only portray anti-competitive semantics in terms of purely monopolistic terms.

> Real positive change to markets comes from forcing individuals to divest from competing companies, or by holding companies and their owners responsible for crimes that they commit.

Absolutely—this is the ideal goal of anti-trust legislation. The statute and your conception of what is right or just are not contrary concepts—except in the statute's extremely limited vocabulary of what constitutes behavior that is anti-competitive.