This is actually how anti-trust works - if you decide a company gets too big you Ma Bell it and break it up, its very actionable, just hard.

> This is vague and not actionable. Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?

No, because if we had proper anti-trust they already would have both been broken up years ago.

There's nothing ambiguous about it at all. We had it as our public policy for generations and then bought-off politicians stopped enforcing it.

The information is captured the same way as most policy - via statute and precedent, and guidelines for enforcement agencies.

None of this is confusing, or even hard, except insofar as it's hard to fight against well funded opponents.

How is going back to a policy that used to work "vague and unactionable"? It literally had been actionable.

Microsoft and Amazon should have been restricted, due to their monopoly power, long before 5 years ago.

I've read enough of the pre-Borkian (ie, pre-1980s) history of antitrust law to know this was very actionable.

They were not easily circumvented in that it required decades of funding and activism to nerf the Sherman Antitrust Act and its successors.

> Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?

Antitrust enforcement can be done retroactively as well, if it appears that a large company abuses its financial firepower to undercut competitors or a marketshare gets too dominant.

It was absolutely actionable and implemented as policy for decades, what are you even talking about? Your phrasing pretends this isn’t exactly how antitrust enforcement worked before the much more recent approach began.