Cory Doctorow

And they know that you have nowhere else to go.

This is that bit Lily Tomlin used to do on Saturday Night Live where she'd pretend to be a Bell operator, an AT&T operator.

She'd do an ad for the Bell system and she would end it with, we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company, right?

So you understand how that would happen.

Now, what happened to competition

It's not a mystery.

So these economists that we would call them neoliberal economists, they're the economists sort of associated with Reagan, but they really held sway for like 40 years.

They had this radical theory of competition and monopoly, what in America we call antitrust, which is the law that tries to prevent monopolies and break them up when they occur.

And they said monopolies are actually good.

that when you see a monopoly in the world, when everyone's buying something from one company, what you should infer is that that company is really good at its job.

And wouldn't it be perverse to punish that company for being so good that we all love it by attacking it using public resources?

And so they said, just leave the monopolies be.

And then...

To, I guess, no one's surprise, unless you've had that specific neurological injury you can only get by doing an econ degree, we got monopolies, right?

And like these guys, they insist that the two are not related, right?

When we observe monopolies in the wild that are quite abusive, you know, whether that's like the automotive sector or intermodal or sea freight shipping, or whether it's like

the sterile bags full of saline or hospital beds or coffins.

One company makes both all the hospital beds and all the coffins.

How's that for a strange little combine?

Or whether it's the five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad tech companies, and one ebook company that dominate media.