Last Christmas, I was given the board game Anti-Monopoly. What a friend had imagined to be an anti-capitalist spoof of Monopoly turned out to be a “free enterprise” game that attempts to teach players the virtues of antitrust laws and free-market competition.

The game was awful. The pieces and money were terrible quality, the rule book was a mess, and the rules of the game rendered it essentially unplayable (it takes hours to bankrupt anybody). Much like the original, Anti-Monopoly is an overpriced scam and felt like a cheap way to earn a quick buck. In attempting to impart the benefits of free-market competition, the game only reminded us of the disappointments it brings.

We should, indeed, be concerned about how far giant tech companies dominate our lives by monopolizing entire industries. The problem is the anti-monopolist critics of Big Tech — from Zephyr Teachout to Shoshana Zuboff — often rely on an implicit idea that beneath the bad monopolist and surveillance capitalism there is a healthy and productive capitalism to which we can return. This myth of a perfectly functioning decentralized market of small and medium businesses in healthy competition — striving for profit, but not striving to maximize profit — lies at the heart of recent anti-monopoly investigations into Facebook, Google, and Amazon. But antitrust lawsuits will only get us so far.