we’re a ways past the threshold of the Standard Oil precedent with big tech. It won’t be a betrayal of the principle of private property to enforce changes in structure, behavior, and ownership.
The Standard Oil precedent, and thus the entire edifice of US anti-trust policy, is based on a lie which was exposed more than 60 years ago. Recommended reading for anyone interested in anti-trust or monopolies:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~twod/oil-ns/articles/research-oil/research-oil/john_mcgee_predatory_pricing_standard_oil1958.pdf
Monopolies don't really exist in the wilds of a true free market. Undercutting the prices of your competitors means you lose money, and even if you drive them out of business, that just means their assets are available at fire sale prices for the next competitor, making it even cheaper for them. The only reason monopolies exist is because a compliant government puts up barriers to hinder new competitors. (The only exception might be DeBeers.)
A classic example is Amazon and sales tax. For years, Amazon resisted paying sales tax, because it gave them an advantage against brick and mortar retailers. But as they became huge, the number of online competitors with similar advantages increased, that flipped. Since they had a physical presence and thus had to pay taxes already in more states, forcing all their online competitors to also pay taxes in those states gave them a relative advantage. And since they were big, the overhead of working out how to pay tax in each of the 10,000 or so local tax codes in the US was relatively cheap for them, and expensive for their smaller competitors. So they dropped their resistance and supported online tax laws, which were quickly passed due to compliant legislatures. This happens in big and small ways all over, with regulations and laws nearly always favoring large and established companies over their new and smaller competitors. That is how real monopolies are created and sustained. Unlike Standard Oil, Big Tech is a real, or state-supported, monopoly.
Just a cursory read of the paper you linked shows it doesn't support your position that monopolies can't exist in the "wilds of a free market", hell a handful of paragraphs in and the author explains a process by which just such a thing can happen without undercutting taking place at all.
The author of this paper then makes a few related critical errors in my opinion. He assumes that "Anything above the competitive value of their firms should be enough to buy them" when asserting a hypothetical in which a potential monopoly or pre-existing monopoly is looking to eliminate localized competition. This is a specious assumption that requires a sort of mechanistic rote logic decision making by the holders of a firm being targeted by a larger one, it ignores the fact that people are rarely if ever perfectly rational and many do in fact form emotional attachments to their holdings that are above the simple market value.
The author again goes on to make the assumption that a monopolistic firm simply wouldn't be willing to eat the costs associated with under cutting when the option of a flat buyout is hypothetically on the table. Again this requires some sort of perfect logic machine to be making decisions. Worse still it ignores the possibility of a long term stratagem in which the potential monopoly is willing to eat the steep short term losses which while possibly steeper than the cost of a buyout could reap long term benefits in the form of a multitude of elements including direct revenue, influence on secondary and tertiary industries, etc that would make the cost benefit analysis make sense.
That paper is shit. He makes an number of "just so" "logical" assumptions to set and justify his premises that are not at all apparent. All manner of scenarios could be conceived that would dismiss each of his necessary clauses, and most of them requiring far fewer assumptions.
The citation was to back up my claim about Standard Oil. That's why it's specifically under that paragraph, and not at the end. The paper illustrates that the basis for the Standard Oil decision, and the ensuing legacy of anti-trust actions, is based on a lie. Standard Oil was not a monopoly, it had many competitors, and those competitors were increasing not diminishing in power. It also debunks predatory pricing. Most of the rationale behind anti-trust regulation was based on a single author, who had no direct expertise on the subject, but who had an axe to grind because her immediate relatives failed to compete successfully with SO.
The paper I cited is highly regarded among economists, and none of your criticisms touch on the heart of the matter. Economic theory requires simplifying complex behavior. This can sometimes be an oversimplification, or miss essential elements, but if you want to point out the flaws in a theory, you need to demonstrate that those simplifications make the conclusions incorrect, you can't simply point out that it doesn't account for every possible variable. That would invalidate every theory in economics, and in most other fields as well.
For instance, it's true that some people will hold to their businesses, even when they're given an offer well above market value. But most will sell. Both because it provides a greater financial reward, and because people who make poor economic decisions will tend to fail out the marketplace, and thus are less likely to own businesses. This is why it's a useful assumption. There are certainly some valid criticisms based on "Homo economicus", but most are based on the same fallacious logic you're making: Economists don't assume that all people are always rational. But people are frequently rational, and rationality is predictable. Conversely, people who behave for reasons beyond purely rational economic trade offs tend to do so for multifarious reasons. So if 90%, or 60%, or even 30% of people behave in an economically rational way, then we can draw conclusions based on that because it creates a clear trend among the otherwise more random data. The same problem applies to your argument about eating costs. Since you appear to like citations for everything, the first chapter of David Friedman's
Hidden Order covers this fundamental basis of economics in a very readable form.
Your long term stratagem argument doesn't undercut anything, either. The problem with eating steep losses is it only makes sense if you can increases your revenue in other areas. For instance, by ending up in a theoretical monopoly position where you can dictate prices. If that can't work, it's just a loss. To prove your point, you'd need to show how a company can use alternatives to a buy out to gain an advantage that outweighs the losses.
If you want a source for why monopolies can't survive in the wild, it's addressed in Thomas Sowell's
Basic Economics. I could also point you at Mises, but that's heavier reading.