The fact that giant companies eventually collapse under the weight of their own greed and complacency doesn’t mean they don’t engage in anticompetitive behavior while they’re at the top.

It means they were not successful at crushing their competitors.

My point is huge companies can engage can have negative effects on competition even if they eventually fall.

How many businesses has Amazon whipped out in the retail space by leaning on the profits from the cloud division?

Just the other day we saw documents from the DOJ’s lawsuit against Google for anticompetitive behavior. In the those documents we saw internal communication about a desire for Google to use their dominance in the browser space to create the web into a walled garden [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28974798

Literally any functioning company has negative effects on its competition.

Google turning the web into a walled garden will simply create opportunity for others.

Those largest companies from 20 years ago didn't fail, they are all doing very well (well, GE excepted), they just did not grow nearly as fast as new tech did.

They were bad investments over that time period. I'm still smarting over my disastrous Cisco investment.

How's Intel doing lately? Nvidia ate their ice cream.

Cisco and Intel could do no wrong prior to 2000.