[wffurr]

That is an excellent question. Why isn't internet search also treated like a public utility?

[MSD1976]

Don’t know. Where and how do you draw the line?

[wffurr]

I would certainly draw it much closer to the public interest that it is now by most countries.

In particular, "platform" businesses like Visa, Google, Amazon, etc. should at a bare minimum restricted from competing with the users of their platform. Ideally, the social value of the platform would be made public by a government buyout (aka nationalization) instead of flowing to the hands of the few select shareholders of the platform or subject to the whims of the platform company's executives.

[wffurr]

Here's a more concrete proposal from someone much closer to the ability to affect this sort of change. https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big.... It includes a definition of a "platform utility".