Cory Doctorow

It's Rich Uncle Pennybags.

They buy other people's toys and play with them.

You take away Google's predatory acquisitions, they wouldn't have a mobile stack, they wouldn't have an ad tech stack, they wouldn't have server management, they wouldn't have document collaboration, they wouldn't have navigation.

They haven't made a successful consumer-facing product in this millennium.

Everything they make dies.

They only have successful products when they buy them from other people and operationalize them.

You're talking mad shit.

about Google right now, man.

But it's not like this fell on our heads or the iron laws of economics dictated it.

We decided not to enforce antitrust law.

And the economists who said, oh, no, monopolies are actually good, today when we're surrounded by monopolies, they're like, how do you know it's our fault?

This is like we used to not have a rat problem because we used rat poison.

And these guys said, you don't need the rat poison.

Rats are eating our faces off.

And they're like, why do you think that's my fault?

Maybe it's like sunspots that ushered in the time of the rat by making them more fecund than at any time in human history.

And yes, it's true, the rats did buy the rat poison factories and shut them down, but we're not using rat poison anymore.

That's just Pareto optimal economically rational behavior.

So these are not mysterious causes.

You have to have the kind of specific neurological injury that you can only get by paying for an economics degree to not understand how this arose.