Why one shouldn’t “own it all”
By: Nataly Lozano
Nothing can test a person’s strength and patience like a good game of Monopoly.
Fun, competition, strategy, heightened emotions, and eventually forgetting whose turn it was to play are all of the emotionally strenuous stages of playing the game.
But what is the end goal? In order to win at Monopoly, you have to be the last player standing with money while those around you go bankrupt.
The origins of the game are almost as vicious.
Hasbro’s version of Monopoly’s origins tells the story of Charles Darrow, an unemployed man in the 1930s who dreamed up a board game and sold it for millions of dollars.
But according to The New York Times, this story isn’t totally true. Behind this popular game is a woman who has been nearly erased from history. Her name is Elizabeth Magie, and her story goes back to 1903.
She created her Landlord’s Game as a way to protest the monopolists of her time. Her game had two sets of rules. One that rewarded all players when wealth was created, and another that pushed players to crush their opponents.
Her game was supposed to be a teaching moment that showed players that the first set of rules was morally superior.
But the monopolist version of her game caught on; Darrow took credit for it, and Magie faded away.
Monopoly is a cutthroat game, indeed.
While dominating a particular sector can make a company very profitable, monopolies lead to unfair advantages.
That’s why the U.S. Department of Justice created a set of laws to prevent “anticompetitive conduct and mergers that deprive American consumers, taxpayers, and workers of the benefits of competition.”
The Sherman Antitrust Act, which passed in 1890, specifically makes it illegal for companies to monopolize or conspire to monopolize products and services. At the time, public hostility was growing for companies like Standard Oil and the American Railway Union, according to Investopedia.
AT&T is perhaps one of the best modern examples of the consequences of monopolization.
AT&T was one of the world’s largest corporations, and it had a monopoly in the telephone industry.
In 1913, the company came to an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to settle an antitrust investigation into their market power, particularly over long-distance phone service, according to Public Knowledge. For consumers, this typically means higher prices and worse service. One sentence about what this meant for consumers: higher prices and worse service
By the 1970s, and with the invention of computer technology, their phone system became inflexible, and, according to NPR, this “monopoly seemed like an obstacle to innovation, an obstacle to the future.”
In 1974, the Department of Justice was on a mission to break up AT&T once and for all. Finally, in 1982, AT&T conceded.
They broke their company into seven smaller regional companies, called “Baby Bells.” According to History Factory, AT&T only retained long-distance, Bell Labs, and Western Electric by the end of the divestiture process.
In recent years, big-tech companies like Google (Alphabet Inc.) have become a threat to their sector. That’s why on Jan. 24, the Department of Justice sued Google for monopolizing digital advertising technologies.
On Sept. 12, the Justice Department and a group of US states finally took Google to court, according to Yahoo Finance.
The outcome of this trial would have major consequences for the way that big tech companies function in the future. One of two things could happen.
If Google is found guilty of anti-competitive behavior, it will be broken up (like AT&T was in the 1980s).
Even if Google wins the suit, the case will change the nature of antitrust by showing Congress that the existing legal frameworks are insufficient to overturn the prevailing antitrust consensus, according to Al Jazeera.
Monopolies are cutthroat, but these sectors don’t have to be. By promoting innovation through fair and equitable competition, we can look forward to better-quality offerings.
