The rating agencies were heavily criticized for their central role in the 2008 financial crisis, yet their fundamental business model and oligopoly remained intact. The failure to implement significant regulatory change during a period of maximum political will demonstrates the incredible resilience of their moat.

While scale is necessary for investment in technology, excessive market concentration (above 20-25%) harms consumers. It incentivizes banks to sit back and extract value rather than innovate and improve service, as competition is the primary driver of betterment.

By eliminating outdated constraints like the six-month activity rule and incorporating time-series data and alternative inputs like rent payments, modern credit scoring models can assess millions of creditworthy individuals, such as military personnel or young people, who were previously unscorable.

A company's monopoly power can be measured not just by its pricing power, but by the 'noneconomic costs' it imposes on society. Dominant platforms can ignore negative externalities, like their product's impact on teen mental health, because their market position insulates them from accountability and user churn.

The FHFA has updated its rules to allow lenders to use newer credit scoring models, like VantageScore 4.0, for mortgages submitted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This breaks the monopoly of an outdated 1990s-era model and can expand homeownership access to millions, particularly in rural communities.

In its failed merger attempt, Cisco argued its market competitors included Sam's Club, a claim regulators rejected. This illustrates that the core of an antitrust case is often not the raw market share number, but the highly debatable and often opaque definition of the market itself, which can be skewed by paid economists.

In the 80s, credit was binary: a high score got a card, a low score got nothing. Capital One pioneered an "information-based strategy," using data to test and price risk for consumers just below the traditional cutoff, effectively creating the modern data-driven lending model.

To get rule changes from giants like Visa and MasterCard, Square didn't fight them. Instead, they showed how their technology would bring millions of new, smaller merchants onto the credit card network—a market the incumbents' existing system was too expensive and complex to reach.

Recent streaming price increases, which are vastly outpacing inflation, serve as the primary evidence that the market is already too consolidated. Further mergers would grant companies like Netflix unchecked pricing power, transferring wealth from consumers and labor directly to shareholders in an oligopolistic environment.