Beyond the Board: How Monopolies Shape the Real World

Image via The Week

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Everyone who has played Monopoly at least once knows how the game ends. In the first hour, everyone is happy, laughing, and having adequate friendly competition. People are buying a couple of properties, spending their money wisely, and collecting rents. By the second hour, tension starts arising. People are being sent to jail and losing all their money, some start raising their voices, and there’s one person who is magically doing perfectly. Five hours creep by, and this player takes control of the whole board. They have every railroad, all the water services, 10 hotels, and 30 houses. Everyone is fighting because it’s so unfair, people quit, say it was just luck, and the gameboard is thrown across the table. That one person greedily wins, regardless of whether the game ever ends, and family ties are broken forever.

Although monopoly is all fun and games, it mimics a very real-world scenario.

On February 27th, people around the world expressed their concerns on media platforms after learning that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros had agreed to merge for $111 billion, following Warner Bros’s decision to put itself up for sale. Comments across social media platforms expressed concerns about a lack of antitrust laws, claiming they would never watch anything produced by them again, and that films can be successful without massive billion-dollar studios funding them. 

These reactions are not new. In fact, the center of this conversation passed GO a while ago. 

Monopolies are defined as “any business or corporation that controls enough of a market to severely discourage competition.” During the Gilded Age, monopolies came to dominate sectors such as railroads and oil. These industries were controlled by very few and allowed no other businesses to compete or oppose them. For example, the Carnegie Steel Company dominated the steel industry through vertical integration. Andrew Carnegie controlled mills, mines, transportation, and barges, basically every single process of producing steel. Many condemned him and claimed that his total control of the industry was an unfair practice not only to other companies trying to enter the market but also inhumane to the workers being exploited in these factories, especially since he was the only one to benefit. After various companies, such as the Carnegie Steel Company, were attacked by society, the Sherman Antitrust Act was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890. This law was the first action Congress took to prohibit trusts and outlaw monopolies. Then, in 1901, during the Progressive era, President Theodore Roosevelt sued Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, successfully breaking them up. He built his reputation as a “trustbuster” and created competitive markets that prevented any company from reaching the levels these companies had achieved.

Since then, monopolies have been operating in silence, and while a few actively work to break them up, they have resurfaced in the public eye. Warner Bros and Paramount are just one example. Companies like Microsoft, Disney, Amazon, and Google continuously raise massive concerns. Modern corporations dominate areas of technology, retail, and media. The 2000s created an environment in which the question arose of whether these companies were on par with those of the Gilded Age or had surpassed them. Monopolies deteriorate businesses. When a company keeps buying more sectors over and over again, it inevitably becomes stagnant. There is a lack of innovation and new products, yet they still charge absurd prices that people are forced to pay because there are no other options, and consequently force small businesses out of the market. Not to mention, the number of people who will lose their jobs, which will affect the labor market as well. The Federal Trade Commission is designed to step in when things start looking like a monopoly and then advise Congress and the president on what to do, but very little has been done to combat them. The 21st century is very different from the 19th century in that regulating these corporations has become increasingly complex and lengthy. 

Just like Monopoly, once one player controls most of the board, everyone else has barely any moves left to make. Unlike the board game, when monopolies win in the real world, it’s more than fake money and plastic houses on the line. It’s prices, jobs, and choices people make every day.

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This article was edited by Abigail D’Angelo.