Antitrust targets: Comcast, Ticketmaster, Google, Blue Cross?

Obama's U.S. Justice Department antitrust prosecutor Christine Varney, in similar talks before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the liberal People for the American Way, says she's junking late-Bush-era limits on corporate anti-competition prosecutions; she plans to enforce the old Sherman Antitrust Act "vigorously". Remarks here.

This is a further rejection (after Alan Greenspan's startling admissions last winter) of the idea that markets can more or less regulate themselves. But what we really want to know is, whose scalps are the Obama people going after? 

Trust-busting has a long and intermittent history, from the government break-ups of Standard Oil in the early 1900s, the old DuPont Co. in 1916, to the fights against AT&T and IBM in the 1960s and 70s, Microsoft in the 1990s.

Possible targets for Obama's trust-busters:

- Google. It's the Microsoft or IBM of this era, grabbing other companies' content for free (including newspapers!) and profiting hugely by selling ads on it. Should the government force Google to share the wealth?

- Telecom. Cable TV companies like Comcast argue they've lost their local monopolies to phone-company, satellite-TV and increased online competition. But a raft of cable practices - like control of local pro sports coverage in Philadelphia - could attract activist Fed scrutiny.

- Ticketmaster. The sports-and-shows gatekeeper is deeply unpopular, according to Consumer Reports' latest Consumerist.com unscientific survey, for the extra fees it tacks on, at a time when online upstarts like Philadelphia's TicketLeap.com can get the job done way cheaper. Attacking Ticketmaster while it's trying to absorb show promoter LiveNation would be a crowd-pleaser, at least.

- Health insurance. Doctors in Pennsylvania derailed a money-saving Philadelphia-Pittsburgh Blue Cross merger when they convinced Insurance Commissioner Joel Ario it would give Blue too much power. If that's really a problem, shouldn't the feds be probing this powerful, expensive industry? But we suspect that would conflict with Obama's other goal -- higher efficiency in the woefully administration-heavy medical care industry.

And of course Intel, which has its own antitrust problems in Europe, story here.