Today, large companies dominate the market. Companies such as Wal-mart and Amazon sell almost anything you could want. This leads to them having a monopoly on almost anything. These companies used to be widespread and bad press could mean the end, but today, companies have gathered together to form mega companies who can do almost anything. I believe that we should limit these companies to help stop them from completely taking over the market.

The basis of capitalism is competition, one company lowers their prices so people will buy more from them and then the other company lowers it even more so the people will come to them. This is how our economy is supposed to work, with companies fighting for customers and all the while prices lowering. But, say suddenly the market is taken over by a single company and that company decides to raise its prices extremely high. There is nothing the customers can do to lower the prices and they have to buy to get access to the resource. This is the threat that is looming over the market today. Except, instead of just one recourse being monopolized it will be all of them thanks to the growing amount of companies that sell everything like Wal-mart and Amazon.

In January 2010, a book publisher Macmillan decided it wanted to lower the price of its books. It took this up with Amazon, their retailer. Amazon completely disagreed and wanted to continue to set prices. To illustrate this point, Amazon cut the links that allowed people to buy Macmillan books. This lasted a week. This means that companies are gathering more and more power over the producers. This means that a well-meaning author or artist could want their products sold for cheaper so it could be available to more people but be denied by large companies looking for profit. This could become detrimental to developing countries because upgrading their current systems will become too expensive for them to keep up (Lynn).

In April 2017, United Airlines flight 3411 was overbooked. To fix that problem United offered compensation up to $10,000 when no one accepted the compensation, they drew from a hat. One unlucky passenger was dragged kicking and biting off the plane. The problem? It was entirely legal. This got United Airlines a lot of attention and the statement every publicity is good publicity has never been truer. According to Erich Joachimsthaler, CEO of the consultancy firm Vivaldi, “the incident and boycott won't greatly affect United's sales”(Garfield). And sure enough, over the next month, United carried 7.6% more people the next month. This is because United has a monopoly over many main air roots, Erich explains. Even though they don’t like the company people who buy tickets through 3rd party discount sites will want the cheapest flights possible. Monopolies are not common to United airlines alone, Almost all of American is dominated by 4 mega-companies: United, American, Delta and Southwest airlines. This means that almost nothing can be done to deal with things they do wrong because you cannot fly without using those airlines least once.

Many people believe that since the government has put in place anti-monopoly laws, otherwise known as anti-trust laws. They are safe from evil corporations taking over the world but this might not be true. All of these antitrust laws have a geographic element to them. This means that companies such as Amazon or China Mobil who are mostly internet based or not even based in America. This may lead to companies growing so large outside of America that Americans will not be able to stop them when the time comes.

With the rise of large corporate giants that sell everything. Consumers and producers are losing power to these companies. The more power they gain the less their own actions will affect them and the more they will have to fall back in case something actually happens. More worrying is that the anti-trust laws made by American government may not.

Works Cited
The. "The United Airlines Boycott Is Not Backing Down — Here's How It Could Affect    Sales." Business Insider. N.p., 2017. Web. 21 Mar. 2018.
Lynn, Barry. "Corporate Giants Have Too Much Power - CNN.Com." Edition.cnn.com. N.p.,    2018. Web. 21 Mar. 2018.