It requires no intent, and iirc the argument of Standard Oil before their censure was precisely that they didn't mean to stifle trade, they were just better than everyone else at it. The Supreme Court said they didn't really care why or how, they cared that it was a monopoly in fact.
But historically anti-trust suits have usually been about what happens when negative sentiment towards American mega-corporations grows too high. Essentially the rules are different for big companies. In reality, most of the things companies need to do to avoid anti-trust cases are performative. Even more ironically, the super rich at the tops of corporate pyramids often end up profiting from these sorts of actions. All an anti-trust suit can do is mandate companies fracture into multiple legal entities. Usually the same owners retain their ownership, only now over dozens or more of companies which each individually pay upwards.
What's even more distressing about these laws is that they're quite unusable against entities that are at least as frightening, like Amazon (and historically Walmart). Amazon is the omni-company, and now they're gonna get into consumer telecom too. And because they're lateral as opposed to vertical and they choked out the competition during a recession, they don't even have to pretend the're offering a square deal to their resellers.
Amazon could very well be the next target. Their practice of driving out smaller resellers in a category and then jacking up prices could be looked at as an antitrust issue.
But historically anti-trust suits have usually been about what happens when negative sentiment towards American mega-corporations grows too high. Essentially the rules are different for big companies. In reality, most of the things companies need to do to avoid anti-trust cases are performative. Even more ironically, the super rich at the tops of corporate pyramids often end up profiting from these sorts of actions. All an anti-trust suit can do is mandate companies fracture into multiple legal entities. Usually the same owners retain their ownership, only now over dozens or more of companies which each individually pay upwards.
What's even more distressing about these laws is that they're quite unusable against entities that are at least as frightening, like Amazon (and historically Walmart). Amazon is the omni-company, and now they're gonna get into consumer telecom too. And because they're lateral as opposed to vertical and they choked out the competition during a recession, they don't even have to pretend the're offering a square deal to their resellers.