Cory Doctorow

And so they said, well, let's tolerate monopolies as efficient.

Let's not engage in this perverse labor of punishing companies for pleasing the people who've elected us to represent them.

Let us celebrate these new efficiencies.

And you do that for 40 years and suddenly every sector becomes a cartel.

We have this in glass bottles, vitamin C, eyeglasses, intermodal shipping, rail, the internet.

As Tom Eastman says, there's five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

We have it in semiconductors.

We have it in professional wrestling.

We have it in plastic bags filled with sterile saline.

And one company controls not just the hospital beds, but also the coffins.

Think about that for a minute.

Right?

So this rampant monopolization did ultimately give rise to this world where firms didn't have to worry about being disciplined by markets, but it also meant they didn't have to worry about being disciplined by governments.

Because when you boil a sector down to just a handful of firms, it's very easy for them to decide what line of bullshit they're going to feed to their regulators.

And because they are so a slosh in money, because they don't compete head to head,

You know, for Google, $20 billion a year to Apple not to enter the search market is a bargain because the erosion of both of their margins, if they were competing head to head in these markets that they've actually divided up amongst themselves, like the Pope dividing up the New World, would cost them both far more than $20 billion.

They'd have to hire each other's employees and pay them more.

They'd have to offer us cheaper things.

They'd have to be better to advertisers.

They'd have to be better to publishers.