To be clear, I don't feel this way to give companies a break. I feel this way because whatever employees were thinking behind the scenes shouldn't matter. If a company locks up the defaults on pretty much all browsers, why isn't that fact alone enough to come to a conclusion?
1. No individuals were charged with anything in this situation. When determining the remedy in an antitrust case, it's always about changes to the company structure or behavior: breaking them up, restricting areas where they can do business, etc. I think whether something was "sanctioned by management" is totally irrelevant here. Also, the types of decisions we're talking about here (acquiring companies, paying off other companies to be the default search engine, etc.) are usually so big they are always done with management approval. What, "Sorry, Bob in accounting accidentally paid Apple a billion dollars to be the default search engine on iOS"?
2. "Intent" here should be totally irrelevant. At the corporate level of behavior, "well, I didn't mean to shoot them" is a nonsensical response. Whether Google's "intent" was to crush the competition or to just vacuum up all the revenue for themselves, who cares? The outcome is the same, and what should be judged is whether the actions Google took as a company were anticompetitive.
I think that maybe goes for going after the decision makers.
As for deciding if the company needs regulation or being broken up because it's operating as a monopoly, there I would agree with you. It wouldn't really matter if it just happened as an accident of the market, or as a planned outcome, if it creates a bad market dynamic, it should be corrected.
Not sure if that’s relevant or not in a monopoly case though.
You're proposing abolishing it but only in antitrust cases?
