Cory Doctorow

Everything they make in-house dies.

They've had one really successful consumer-facing product.

It was in the previous millennium.

It's a thing called Search.

Everything else they've made has basically tanked.

And what they do is they bought a mobile stack, an ad tech stack, a maps and navigation stack, documents and collaboration, server management, you name it, right?

They bought it from someone else and operationalized it.

They're not Willy Wonka's idea factory.

They're just like rich uncle penny bags, right?

They're just buying other people's ideas.

So you're going straight into my next point.

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?