Cory Doctorow

So it's not really about which of these symptoms they're showing.

It's about what's happening when they exhibit these symptoms.

Well, so there are four things that discipline companies, this is the term economists use, discipline is like when something bad happens to you because you've done something bad.

And there are four forces that discipline companies historically, and we can see how they've all been eroded.

So the first one, as you mentioned, is competition, right?

It's not, it doesn't matter if you're the only restaurant in town and you serve a bad meal, if there's nowhere else to go, it kind of doesn't matter.

People are still going to show up and eat there.

I mean, we've all had this experience on the other side of the TSA checkpoint where you really do have

effectively the only restaurant in town, right?

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?