Cory Doctorow

And look, I'm not someone who believes that markets are the best or only arbiter of how we allocate resources.

I think that there are other ways that we can do things.

But even if you are the kind of like Elon Musk addled libertarian who can't open your copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are all stuck together.

And you think that the only thing that our government should ever do is enforce contracts?

You still want them to enforce contracts, right?

And for the referee to referee the game adequately, they have to be more powerful than the players on the field.

So I tell my libertarian friends, look, the smallest government you can have

is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate.

And the decision, which was taken in the late 1970s, first under Carter and then accelerating under Reagan and through the rest of it, and really coterminal with the tech industry.

So remember, Ronald Reagan went on the campaign trail the year the Apple II Plus went on sale.

The tech industry grew up, and as it got bigger, antitrust got smaller.

It's really the first post-antitrust industry, which is why it looks the way it does.

And when we decided that we would no longer enforce anti-monopoly law, we really did set in motion these very foreseeable outcomes.

And the people responsible for it, they insist that their pro-monopoly posture, which boiled down to this,

that monopolies are efficient.

That when you observe a monopoly in the wild, what you must be seeing is a company that is very pleasing to people.

Because if a company isn't pleasing to people, then other people will enter the market and take away your monopoly.

And so any monopoly that you find, tautologically, by circular reasoning, must be a good company.

And so if Apple is controlling all of the app market, if Google is controlling 90% of the search market, what you're observing is a firm that is so pleasing that everyone is voluntarily using them.

And if they weren't, then they would be out-competed.