When chattel slavery ended many of the freed slaves became sharecroppers, bound to the land by eternal debts that could never be repaid. Although they were no longer legally bound to their "masters", for many their lives were not really any better.
Although in principle the monopolies and the government are separate institutions, we all know that the reality is that our politicians are bought out by the corporations, and the regulators are staffed by ex-employees of the very companies they are supposed to be regulating. We used to bust monopolies, but since the 70s or so the regulators have become very lax, and practically every industry has become more consolidated than it's ever been (finance, advertising, airlines, utilities, telecom, agriculture, healthcare, etc).
What's interesting to me is that whenever Google/Facebook does something authoritarian that would seem to violate some principle of liberty we deem sacred (eg. censorship, violating freedom of speech), many if not most of the comments seem to rationalize the corporation's decision as exercising their own free speech. But when you're Reddit with 430M monthly active users, your userbase is the population equivalent of the world's 3rd largest country, and so you're effectively the equivalent of a nation-state. When you're Amazon with 750k employees, then your employees could fill up a city.
Does the principle of democracy only apply to country's governments, or does it also extend to corporate monopolies?