Perhaps you think that monopolies are a thing of the past—that the muckrakers uncovered enough muck and mocked the robber barons so badly that they all hid their heads in shame and went away forever; that we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act and Theodore Roosevelt rode out on his horse over a hundred years ago, trampled the trusts under his its hooves, and we all went on living in a free market paradise.

I have some bad news for you. Monopolies are alive and well, and some we see today just might make J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller all blush.

Let's start off with some alarming numbers that should alarm all of us.

Communications giant Comcast controls over 50 percent of the broadband market in the U.S. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Comcast and Charter together have complete monopolies over some 47 million Americans who have no other choice for cable providers.

Google (27.1 percent), Meta (19.5 percent), and Amazon (12.9 percent), collectively bring in about 60 percent of all digital ad revenue. Amazon also commands nearly 38 percent of retail e-commerce, controls somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of all book distribution, and maintains about a third of the data storage market (with Azure capturing 22 percent and Google 11 percent).

Apple dominates smartphone sales with a........

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