This is mostly due to not trust busting enough in society. If there were actual competitive markets, not monopolies/oligarchies/monopsonies/cartels, the business world would be completely different.
Either that, or legislate workplace democracy.
Either that, or legislate workplace democracy.
Whenever I am looking for a new solution to a need at work, I would go to sites like g2.com to look at the lists of the most popular ones, and would then typically skim reviews of the top ~10, and more fully evaluate the top ~3. But there are often hundreds of alternatives that I haven't given a chance to, and I know that it's my <s>laziness</s> need to manage my limited time that's promoting this oligopoly, rather than any particular issue with all of those other providers down the list.
I don't see how legislation can help here, other than picking a provider for me. If anything, this is actually a place where I feel that AI tools, and particularly ChatGPT's Deep Research can research a lot more of the alternatives than I as a human would have time for. But that of course has its own set of issues, and I really don't know what the solution is. We no longer live in that world where you just use that provider who lives down the street.
There are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, it's very easy if you open up your imagination.
half of the country disagrees with the other half on almost every issue. the first thing a party is going to do when elected is change the nationalized payment processor's policy to ban the other half of otherwise law-abiding companies and individuals to stop them from being able to do business.
at least now with stripe there's some lead time and it takes a few years after a major political shift to feel the effects, which makes it more stable.
a better solution is to change a different piece of legislation that currently allows Stripe to choose to do business with whoever it wants, which is what allows them to ruin you. if stripe were legally required to provide you with service unless your business were proven in court to be against the law, this problem would be solved without another bulky addition to the already bloated public sector.
It's not Stripe though (they do of course have their own policies, but) mostly it's the downstream financial institutions. Stripe is an API over the existing financial ecosystem, which is both incredibly regulated and somehow still the wild west.
So, you'd actually need to change the law for all financial institutions/payment processors (really it's Visa and MC that are the issues most of the time), and even then it's not that simple.
Consider, this law passes and is implemented. What do Visa/MC/Stripe/Paypal do when they identify a fraudster. Do they need to go to court to stop having them as a client? Who holds liability for any fraudulent transactions between identification and the court case.
Like, I completely agree in principle given how central internet transactions have become to all of our lives, but there's a bunch of complexity that would need to be dealt with to avoid creating a whole host of new problems.
Steve Yegge talks about this: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legal...
(funnily enough, he gives a financial system example in this blog post, which I'd entirely forgotten).
While I would love for these systems to be fair and righteous and all of that jazz, I soberly must recognize that I lack the resources and desire to do all or even any of that work myself, and therefore have no leg to stand on in holding others accountable for not doing so.
there are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, but the most expedient and obvious one is to stop wasting government money on poorly-managed nonsense created by committee and allow people to regain that lost value in the form of tax decreases.
if your solution to a problem involves increasing taxes for any reason, it's a bad solution.
edit: they maintain national parks. that's pretty cool, but thats like a drop in the bucket for their budget
When I get text spam it almost always originated from twlio or formerly their subsidiary zipwhip.
i don't think this has to do with trust-busting i think this has to do with there being lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
but regarding the principle of what you said, especially with tech markets, the government has a vested interest in keeping these companies as monopolistic as possible. a monopoly is always at risk of being taken down by the government, so the government has good leverage over them. with this leverage they can demand all sorts of things from them they otherwise couldn't like warrantless access to user-data and there's nothing the company can do about it. even if the leadership cared about protecting that data. its a much lower administrative cost to abuse one large company that it is to abuse hundreds of more competitive smaller ones.