I dont know, another commenter mentioned the highly unregulated crypto currency market, where Bitcoin consistently dominates 50%+ of the market, even without government intervention at all. I think, especially without reference to an actual historical stateless society, its hard to say monopolies can never form. I also would like your perspective on Standard Oil, which bought up 90% of the oil refinery market without any favorable government regulation.
Im glad you're not simply stating that monopolies could never exist with perfect competition, as even with extremely unregulated markets like crypto currency the market tends towards a pareto distribution where there are almost always a single high performer dominating the market.
With that said, if monopolies can form naturally without any assistance (by gov't, for example), how can a market naturally balance the scales in favor of competition? I say this in reference to Standard Oil, which bought off 90% of the oil business without government intervention, and then started using anti-free market pricing strategies to keep competitors from forming.
Thats a good point, most companies can offer the illusion of choice by diversifying their product lines along different price points or feature optimization.
Ive worked for a few global companies, and the level of control across regions is scary. Many global companies (like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft) can afford to have offices in every major country, and many times multiple office locations in those same countries. Due to their flat corporate structure in tech companies, they are highly agile to shifting market conditions all across the world, and its scary to think if a company had a complete stranglehold on the global economy they could really shut down local competition.
More recently, its been government intervention thats been trying to hold back the growing influence of these tech companies (GDPR and the lawsuit against Google in the EU come to mind right away), but Im wondering if government is the only way to respond to a growing oligopoly or monopoly, or if theres an free market "event horizon" where a certain level of competition must exist in order to prevent a monopoly from forming.