And realistically, they don't require a monopoly. If there are 1000 competitors but they all have the same evil ideology at the helm, the result is identical. Your choice is now "flee the country".
Except, wait no. Those companies have the entire western world by the balls. Want to avoid extreme surveillance from Google? Maybe there's a forest somewhere you can forage in.
We live in a representative democracy. We all have a choice in who we vote for, what polices we support. In addition, we have checks and balances in place to prevent the consolidation of power. The government is not "one thing", it's hundreds of things working together.
Now, the system is not perfect, and I never claimed it to be. But compare this to how corporations functions. Corporations function as totalitarian dictatorships. You cannot vote. You have no influence. And they make decisions unilaterally, regardless of how harmful or stupid said decision may be.
The arm in which we control corporations IS the government. It IS regulation. The only reason you're not working 80 hours a week and dying young is because of the government. Now, again, that doesn't mean the government is perfect. But those regulations were protested for and voted in by people just like you and me, and I think that's good. So sue me.
That is not the only arm we control corporations with, corporations even die sometimes for doing the wrong thing. And voting internally is not the only way to change a corporations behavior. I think talking about them being a dictatorship is confusing the aspects we're talking about.
I don't know when I said the government and corporations were the same thing when monopolies, but I still hold one is much more destructible than the other when they are properly separated (they aren't).
I don't think markets and capitalism solve everything. I would say when democracy and capitalism are both working well (not right now) their combo is awesome.
I don't think placing all blame on corporations is productive because it's a misdiagnosis. I am more afraid of the ratchet effect than I am of Google, but they both scare the shit out of me.
Edit- I admit my original comment wasn't very good, I apologize.
I think, though, when we see many (all?) corporations exhibiting the same bad behavior, and said bad behavior materially negatively affects the population, that's a sign we have a gap in legislation. We shouldn't, and really can't, play wack-a-mole with corporations individually with individual actions. We should fix it upstream.
For example, I find it very annoying to have to fill out time cards or such, and other people find it very annoying to have any demands whatsoever on their time outside of core working hours. If we had to have a political debate about which is the one true working model, we'd get pretty worked up about it, and if I lost I'd go away bearing a pretty strong grudge about the daily annoyance that was inflicted on me against my will. Instead, there's some companies that do it one way and some that do it the other, and we self-sort between them according to our preferences.
Which is, imo, one of the primary reasons of the stagnation of US society over the past 50 years.
We are at all time lows for internal migration. This reduces dynamism drastically. People used to chase economic and social opportunity. Sometimes multiple times through a well lived life.
The whole point of states was you could relatively trivially pull up stakes and move for better opportunity. Once people decided that was impossible (and historically speaking, it's actually less risky than ever before) things really went to shit.
Overall and in generally speaking terms: US citizens have chosen comfort over every other metric when it comes to every single daily decision they make in aggregate.