Monopoly

Ahhh Monopoly. Great 19-hour game. The thimble. The dude in the weird chimney sweeper hat. The destroyed friendships.

Control a whole side of the board, build houses and then hotels on it… and odds of a competitor landing there to suffer huge fees are wickedly high. You take that cash, buy more properties, build more houses and hotels and eventually…rule the world. Or at least the board.

That’s a monopoly. When you own everything and can raise rates to pretty much whatever level the market will pay before just opting to do nothing. The key phrase here is “mono”... and it’s not related to the teen kissing disease.

Mono as in “one.” One owner. One setter of prices. The only game in town. Think: Microsoft in the 1990s, where its operating system was pretty much the only way in which computers around the globe could work.

Or today, Google Search, which is almost a monopoly with some 90-ish percent of searches on its servers.

Is it bad that these companies produced such amazingly highly desired products that they grew into monopolies? No, not at all. However, regulators got all wooly on them for using that monopoly leverage to restrict business from peripheral competitors.

The key issue revolves around what governments define as quote “fair competition” unquote. Like…what is fair here? If a gas station uses its leverage as a place where SUVs go to drink up, is it fair for that station to sell a pack of gum for 5 bucks?

Totally.

But what if the station forced you to buy that stick of gum with every gallon of gas? Do you have alternatives?

What if the owner of that station owned all of the stations within 500 miles and forced everyone who filled up to buy that 5 dollar gum with each fill? Fair? Hmm…pausing…probably not. You could say that they have a local monopoly and that they are unfairly leveraging it to their advantage.