[rebornshellfish]

Something I wonder is: would we have anywhere near as much of a problem with a handful of companies monopolising the information technology industry, if we didn't have Intellectual Property laws?

People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant.

It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.