Cory Doctorow

Thank you.

So there's another force that disciplines companies, which is regulation.

So you can think of competition as the discipline of the market.

Regulation is the discipline of the state.

They're really kind of the same thing, because if you allow companies to merge and merge and merge and you create a cartel, the cartel does something called regulatory capture.

And that's where the companies get the regulators to work for them instead of working for the public.

And that's something that's only possible if you can solve, you remember the collective action problem?

You and your friends can't agree on when to leave Facebook?

Well, 200 companies can't agree on what they want their regulator to do, but five companies can, right?

And these companies, they're so inbred, they've got Habsburg jaws, right?

You have the same executives hopping from C-suite to C-suite to C-suite.

They're all godparents to each other's children.

They're executors of each other's estates.

They're in the same polycules.

And they just show up at regulatory fora with exactly the same story.

And they have so much capital because they don't compete.

Again, when you have a cartel, they can divide up the world like the Pope dividing up the new world, right?

So, you know, Apple gets a $20 billion plus per year bribe every year from Google not to enter the search market.

Right.

So they don't have to worry about eroding one another's margins by directly competing.