I'm not a huge proponent of trust busting. However as I wrote, we need to at least have a conversation about what impact these companies, who have massively outsized power to collect data, interpret and iterate products/services on this data, have on the market.

For a specific example: Lets say you are a PhD computer vision team and you want to create a machine vision API, where anyone can upload an image and return a list of objects in that image. Your product will be less capable than the Google Vision API or the Microsoft Vision API to start with, simply because they have orders of magnitude more data and personnel they can train their networks with. Now lets say you have a novel technique that is faster or needs less data. Ok, well more than likely Google or Microsoft would come to you with $XXM and offer to buy you out. You say no, we're gonna win this space. Well unfortunately, Google/MSFT personnel go to the same vision conferences, recruit equally if not more competent personnel and they just recreate your solution, even if slightly less capable. They also have a much bigger sales staff so they can always beat you at BD and support etc...

So the question in my mind is: Is the bar to compete unreasonably high such that you effectively need hundreds of millions of dollars to compete?

I use Machine Learning examples because they are literally where the biggest competitive gains and fastest growth are happening - also what I know the best in this case.

However I see this happening in almost every market, home furnishings (the market we play in most) is seeing the same thing, but with logistics/fulfillment instead of machine learning - such that the big retailers/manufacturers can take advantage of more efficient fulfillment than smaller ones can.