Ecological antitrust is one of the framework’s more distinctive contributions to the ownership-concentration problem. Traditional antitrust often turns on price: a monopoly is suspect mainly when it raises prices. But many digital and AI monopolies offer low prices — even free access — while becoming ecologically dominant, which price-based tests cannot see. So the framework changes the question from are prices too high? to has one node accumulated too much indispensable jurisdiction?
Its indicators follow from the route-around test: inability to route around a provider, control of essential interfaces, a suppressed emergence of alternatives, high switching costs, dependency concentration, control of standards, downstream self-preferencing, and the ability to exclude competitors from necessary infrastructure. The remedy is not automatically to shrink a firm — a large firm can be tolerable if it stays interoperable, exitable, and routable — but to restore plurality, contestability, or public standing wherever a single node has become impossible to bypass, escalating to critical-infrastructure obligations or structural separation where necessary.