What does this mean? If there is no regulator, someone else will use force to prevent voluntary mutually beneficial deals from taking place?
Cartels form and collude, the JP Morgans or Goulds of the world see excessive competition next to their neat steel or railroad trusts and decide to organize it. And sometimes this can even be an improvement (those old telephone poles with like 90 separate junctions just got too tall to be safe!)
But on average, the public would like (or should want) a say in how markets are organized, because it is both possible and lucrative to induce market failure. Big Tech is especially good at this (its arguably far more their speciality than technology is).
Markets are inevitable (try to stop them forming if you don't believe me), but market failures are generally not inevitable, they are generally the result of poorly refereed markets.
Well, yes. But that does seem to gloss over the important part which is how they do it - hiring lobbyists and influencing the official regulators. If the frame is that someone is going to be the most powerful force in the market then sure, but the government setting it to be a particular body by fiat just creates a ripe target for corruption.
The history of the tech industry has been one of where if left to their own devices coders would create a thriving and tolerant software ecosystem and the main thing stopping them has been IP law. And a secondary thing stopping them has been government pressure (there has been a bit of a spasm recently because of the aftereffects of, effectively, systems set up to support things like Operation Choke Point, for example).
Assuming some semblance of the rule of law, Google & friends ultimately can't stop someone competing with them unless the government is active in the space the space too. More formal regulation is probably just going to cement their position further.
Year after year, big business lobbies, bribes, cajoles, blackmails, whatever it takes to get rid of attack dog regulators like Lina Khan.
I'm sorry friend, history does not say what you think it does. History says that good outcomes come from either brutally regulated monopolies (ATT / Western / the Labs), public/private partnerships (DoD funding the Internet, basically every major innovation we coast on today), and busting the fucking chops of mega-trusts (JP Morgan, Gould, steel, railroads, telegraph, it goes on and on).
Why does big business hate aggressive regulation if it's "actually good for them"?
They like a Goldilocks regulation, a little friction to new entrants, a lot of discretion in the hands of pliant former industry people.
They hate Lina Khan.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
They don't have anything against regulators and they certainly don't have anything against dumb regulators.
They've got a little red laser dot on the forehead of regulators who don't want a payday after a term of "public service".
"Because we poor public servants are always looking for some fat, private sectors payoff down the road. But I'm not looking, and by the time they can pull the strings to force me out, they'll be ruined."
- Chrisjen Avasarala
If we destroy an entity that has power, the power goes someplace else and in the case of (democratic) government entities, it rarely ends up someplace better for us regular folks.
The question is whether those things are going to be determined at a polling place by voters or in a smoke-filled room by gangsters.
People so often rail against a government telling them they can't do something but so rarely justify they would be able to do it if the government was destroyed.
But lets call it what it is: when a bunch of made men see a power vacuum and set up an informal clique with its own rules and loyalty tests while protesting "just a merchant nothing to see here"?
Thats like, the entry for gangster on the Wiki for the Sopranos.
Only regulators have absolute power in this regard. I'd prefer decentralized power
It's concerning that you don't see this, but makes no difference to how the world works.
The consortium creates an oligopoly which prevents mutually beneficial deals that would have otherwise taken place in a regulated competitive free market between consumers and producers.
Maybe it's not a great choice of words to say here "the large company regulates the space" but it's definitely a problem worth pointing out.
But they're dictators. There's no democracy, there's no voting, and Apple does whatever it feels is best for them. Just like a dictator would run their country.
There's plenty of mutually beneficial arrangements that Apple unilaterally struck down because they want to maintain their stranglehold on the market.