US vs Meta : Progressive regulation or crushing the free market?

IT SOUNDS like a chapter in prehistory, but in 1969 the US government launched an antitrust case against the then technological giant International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) about the mainframe computer it was making.

The case dragged on for 13 years, and by then personal computers had entered the market and made mainframe computers extinct, leading the Justice Department to drop its case. Then just a few years later, IBM itself was fighting for survival as it found itself competing against the new kids in Silicon Valley.

In the 1990s another government antitrust case, this time against one of those techie new kids, Microsoft, ended up with a settlement; and by then, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was losing its dominance to Netscape Navigator and eventually to other browsers which were bundled with Windows, weakening the case against it.