# Antitrust

> Antitrust is mapped as the allocation: it decides how wealth, work, ownership, risk, care, and public goods are distributed and governed.

| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Stable ID | `node:kiduna:political-change:political-economy:antitrust` |
| Family | Political Economy & Distribution |
| Domain | Political Economy |
| Kind | mechanism |
| Archetypal function | The Allocation |
| Epistemic status | synthesis; supported |

## Concrete anchor

Antitrust belongs to the **Political Economy & Distribution** family. It is treated as a specific political object, role, institution, tactic, event, ideology, or mechanism before any symbolic transfer is made.

## What it does

Antitrust decides how wealth, work, ownership, risk, care, and public goods are distributed and governed, changing who can act, what becomes visible, and which costs are distributed to others.

## Who gains and who loses power

The mechanism can increase the capacity of actors able to use Antitrust, while shifting cost, delay, risk, exclusion, or dependence toward actors with less authority, information, organization, money, or safe access. The distribution is conditional, not an essence of the node.

## Archetypal function

**The Allocation.** Antitrust is mapped as the allocation: it decides how wealth, work, ownership, risk, care, and public goods are distributed and governed.

## Gift

reveals material stakes beneath symbolic conflict; through Antitrust, that capacity becomes available for deliberate use.

## Wound / Shadow

reduces people to incentives or treats one distribution as natural; Antitrust can then reproduce the very arrangement it claims to change.

## Conditions

- scale and jurisdiction are explicit
- affected people and absent stakeholders are named
- time horizon and countermoves are considered

## Strategic meaning

Use Antitrust to identify the operative target, resource, dependency, decision forum, and likely countermove. Ask what would make the mechanism stronger, weaker, more legitimate, or less necessary.

## Divinatory meaning

The Allocation enters through Antitrust. Read for the capacity seeking expression, the cost displaced from view, and the relationship that changes if the frame moves.

**Question:** What changes when Antitrust becomes the unit of analysis rather than background?

## Game function

**event.** Reveal one hidden dependency connected to Antitrust; another player names a countermove. Initiative 4.

## Relationships

- **distributes costs to — Industrial Policy:** Industrial Policy distributes costs to Antitrust by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **depends on — Monopoly:** Antitrust depends on Monopoly by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(synthesis; supported)_
- **institutionalizes — Unarmed Civilian Protection:** Antitrust institutionalizes Unarmed Civilian Protection by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_
- **mobilizes — Public Algorithm Register:** Public Algorithm Register mobilizes Antitrust by changing authority, participation, resources, information, legitimacy, timing, or the cost of cooperation. _(interpretive; tentative)_

## Countermaps and polarity prompts

- Read Antitrust from the viewpoint of the actor who bears its cost.
- Reverse cause and symptom: what if Antitrust is an effect of the system it appears to drive?
- Change the clock: what looks different over a day, an election cycle, a generation, and a century?
- Ask when the Gift becomes the Wound through scale, secrecy, intensity, latency, or unequal reciprocity.

## Epistemic and Sentinel note

Claim layers: synthesis, interpretive, symbolic_divinatory. Scope, jurisdiction, period, and source perspective may change the claim.
No node-specific Sentinel factors were recorded; ordinary source, audience, and context checks still apply.

## Visual direction

A text-free enamel expression of Antitrust: one dominant mechanism, one counterforce, raised warm-metal linework, midnight field, restrained civic red, teal, ivory, and amber. No party logo, national flag, sacred symbol, or recognizable person.

## Research / provenance

- [Introduction to Political Science](https://openstax.org/details/books/introduction-political-science) — OpenStax, 2022. Comparative institutions, political behavior, and public policy foundations.
- [Preventing Policy Capture](https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/preventing-policy-capture_9789264065239-en.html) — OECD, 2017. Mechanisms and safeguards concerning capture of public decision-making.
- [National Labor Relations Act](https://www.nlrb.gov/guidance/key-reference-materials/national-labor-relations-act) — National Labor Relations Board, 1935. U.S. collective-bargaining and protected concerted-activity framework.

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Engine Output version 1.0.0; generated 2026-08-24T00:00:00Z. Sentinel annotations are stored separately in `sentinel/handoffs.json`.
