Weaving An Antimonopoly Web

[charles mueller <cmueller@metrolink.net>]

        There's a new Web site that I'd like to call everyone's attention
to.  This one deals with monopoly in a specific industry, electric/gas
utilities, one of the country's largest and most important fields.  The work
of Mark Krebs, it's an extensive site featuring the writings and testimony
of experts on both utilities and the economics of monopoly, with an
orientation that is both pro-consumer and pro-environment.  The address is:
                                  http://www.regwarn.org/restruct.htm

        Aside from the size and national significance of this particular
industry, Mark's splendid work here highlights the enormous antimonopoly
potential of the Internet:  Why not such a Web site devoted to EACH of the
country's individual monopolies, created by a person who's especially
knowledgeable about and concerned with that particular industry?  Why not a
Web site focusing on, for example, each of such high-cost industries as the
airlines, breakfast cereals, our railroad monopoly, our national bus
monopoly (Greyhound), cigarettes, beer, soft drinks, auto retailing, funeral
homes/cemeteries, and so on?  By collecting data and expert opinion, these
industry-specific Web sites could spotlight, for example, the magnitude of
the consumer overcharges being exacted in each of those monopoly industries
plus the anticompetitive PRACTICES used to obtain their monopoly power and
to exclude entry by competitive newcomers, e.g., predatory pricing in the
airline industry, exclusive dealing/territories in beer and soft-drinks, and
so on.

        We'll have, in due course, scores of immensely valuable Web sites in
the antimonopoly field.  As the advancing technology lowers their costs and
simplifies their creation, it becomes increasingly easy and economical for
those who're conerned with the world's monopoly problem to communicate among
themselves and with the public at large.  In addition to Mark's
industry-specific type, there'll soon be one or more devoted to EACH of
those individual monopoly-building 'practices' mentioned above--mergers,
predatory pricing, price discrimination, boycotts, tying, exclusive dealing,
refusal to sell, resale price fixing, and the like.  In the aggregate,
they'll hopefully create a 'critical mass' of evidence and analyses that our
media and politicians will find it increasingly hard to ignore.  Each, no
matter how small, will add to that mass and together they'll be far stronger
than the sum of their parts, perhaps ultimately setting the stage for a
serious antimonopoly effort around the world.

        My congratulations to Mark Krebs.

        Charles Mueller, Editor
        ANTITRUST LAW & ECONOMICS REVIEW
        http://webpages.metrolink.net/~cmueller

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