Try again, I hope you are not a lawyer because you utterly fail. Please provide a specific reference to where it is limited to competitors. The laws are based around preventing competition, there is no loop hole that requires you to first be a competitor.
Interestingly trusts can literally involve others who may not be direct competitors but the collective can materially gain by limiting others ability to compete with those aligned with you, that was actually some of the impetus behind anti trust laws. The intentional deceptions used by groups to limit a company’s ability to compete. For example just denying a basic raw material that would prevent a company ability to compete. A competitor could ask a supplier to not sell to another competitor, maybe by offering a a higher payment for that raw material, a price they can pay due to their specific market share thus preventing a company from even starting up, both the company and supplier then would run afoul of anti trust laws. Very similar to the idea of influencing advertisers now in the twitter case.
A little insight, I did not just recently educate myself on this. You might want to come better prepared before tossing around thinly veiled ad hominems, especially when you are so misinformed.
I provided references to specific acts directly tied to the laws, you respond with assertions, basically your whole reply is an informal logical fallacy.
This is reductio ad absurdum.
“Very similar to the idea of influencing advertisers now in the twitter case.” No, it absolutely is not, unless you say that the advertisers’ money is a “raw material.” The advertising organizations aren’t bauxite producers choking off supplies to an aluminum producer.
“Interestingly trusts can literally involve others who may not be direct competitors but the collective can materially gain by limiting others ability to compete with those aligned with you, that was actually some of the impetus behind anti trust laws.” The advertisers are neither direct nor indirect competitors.
“For example just denying a basic raw material that would prevent a company ability to compete. A competitor could ask a supplier to not sell to another competitor, maybe by offering a a higher payment for that raw material, a price they can pay due to their specific market share thus preventing a company from even starting up, both the company and supplier then would run afoul of anti trust laws.” Again, there is no raw material denied.
The defendants in this case would neither suffer nor prosper based on the demise of X. You say that for the application of the law “the collective can materially gain,” yet neither you nor X can express what that gain would be.
Laws protecting competition apply to competitors: there are none here.