[arrosenberg]

To a substantial degree, yes. Vertical integration reduces the dynamism of the market.

I used a cover-all term, because there are too many to really name. Facebook is a co-conspirator in defrauding American elections, Amazon uses their data to kill small businesses, Google has been repeatedly fined in the EU for using search anti-competitively. Those are just 3 tech companies, and doesn't get into how data is used abusively by credit agencies, banks, and other financial institutions.

Regulating industry is a fools errand, and part of how we wound up here. Breakups are the only self-executing, corruption-resistant solution.

Are our tech companies the most competitive at in the world? The largest companies have been cutting off our startups at the knees for a decade, so we have no idea how competitive we could actually be. It doesn't really seem like our big tech companies have to compete much at all these days, actually.