Cory Doctorow

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.

So they have lots of money to spend on policy adventures.

So we don't have to.

So what that means is that if the companies use the power they have in the market to abuse you, we no longer have competitors who are acting as a check on their behavior.

But we also don't have regulators.

The regulators don't step in either.

And so you get this combination where you could have competitors.

a system that was integrated and worked from top to bottom and was quite seamless, right?

And it's not necessary for firms to all be under one roof to do that, although it sometimes helps.

But like, you know, all the light bulbs in your house work, even though the light sockets and the light bulbs are all made by different people, like standards are a thing.