Ok, so the government should do something about what the oil companies are doing to us. And the media being bought up by a few powerful corporations. And the mortgage companies predatory lending to us. And probably a bunch of other shit I can't think of right now.
Being a monopoly isn't bad. It's what the monopoly does to us that is bad. And the corporations are doing things that are bad to us.
So you understand that monopolies are bad. Do you understand why they are bad? What do monopolies do to us? I bet if I wikipedia it, a lot of what is bad about monopolies will be what corporations are doing to us today. Let me see.
In political discourse, the term monopoly is frequently invoked as a blanket generalization in criticism of firms with large market share or lack of what is perceived as "fair" competition.[3]
The latter usage of the term is more predominant among non-economists than economists and while its assertions may hold true, it is not based upon the definition of "monopoly," used by economists.
A monopoly should be distinguished from monopsony, in which there is only one buyer of a product or service; a monopoly may also have monopsony control of a sector of a market. Likewise, a monopoly should be distinguished from a cartel (a form of oligopoly), in which several providers act together to coordinate services, prices or sale of goods.
BINGO. We may not have a problem with a Monopoly today dave. But the same problems you get with a monopoly, we are seeing on a grand scale. It's more COLLUSION!!!!
No close substitutes: A monopoly is not merely the state of having control over a product; it also means that there is no real alternative to the monopolised product.
A price maker: Because a single firm controls the total supply in a pure monopoly, it is able to exert a significant degree of control over the price by changing the quantity supplied.
Some argue that it can be good to allow a firm to attempt to monopolize a market, since practices such as dumping can benefit consumers in the short term; and once the firm grows too big, it can be dealt with via regulation. When monopolies are not broken through the open market, often a government will step in, either to regulate the monopoly, turn it into a publicly owned monopoly environment, or forcibly break it up (see Antitrust law). Public utilities, often being natural filiations and less susceptible to efficient breakup, are often strongly regulated or publicly owned. AT&T and Standard Oil are debatable examples of the breakup of a private monopoly. When AT&T was broken up into the "Baby Bell" components, MCI, Sprint, and other companies were able to compete effectively in the long distance phone market and began to take phone traffic from the less efficient AT&T server.
