This is Motley Fool Answers. I'm Alison Southwick, joined as always by Robert Brokamp,

personal finance expert here at the Motley Fool. Hey, bro. Hello, Alison.

Well, welcome back. Yes, that's right. We took a bit of an extended summer break.

And as we like to do every now and then, we're changing up the format of scosh. But don't worry,

it's not that drastic, a new rug, maybe some throw pillows. All that and more on this week's

episode of Molly Full Answers. So the other day, I was driving in my car, listening to NPR,

like the mid-Atlantic Coast metropolitan area residing person that I am, when I heard the phrase,

hipster antitrust. At first, I was like, is hipster a thing we're saying again? The answer is not really.

And then I wondered, what is this antitrust business about? Well, way back in 2017, a woman named

Lena Khan wrote a now famous piece for the Yale Law Journal,

arguing that the rise of massive tech companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, etc., proved that

modern American antitrust laws were flawed and how we decide if a company has an unfair monopoly

is outdated and ineffective.

So to oversimplify the status quo that she was railing against,

one of the joys of a free market is that you have many companies competing to sell the same product.

And they keep each other in check by trying to offer the better price or the best service or some other value proposition to customers.

If one company has a monopoly, then they can charge whatever exorbitant price they want because the customers

have nowhere else to go for the same product or service. And this is bad. Judge Pro, did I explain

that correctly enough? Well, of course, Alison, because you always get everything right. But as you point out,

one of the main reasons that a monopoly can be bad is because they have all the pricing power.

Thus, as long as prices don't go up, there are really no problems, at least to some people. However,

I think what's happening now is there is this evolving idea of what constitutes sort of the ill

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