[MrMan]

Rents like 2 percent management fees and 20 percent incentive fees for private equity and hedge funds? Lack of antitrust enforcement of tech firms? Sell side firms and their business models are the least of our problems in my opinion.

You mentioned data in passing - middlemen who extract rents as data purveyors are extracting huge rents and it is largely unremarkable upon maybe because west coast people are the shadiest rent-seekers of all time. At least financial mstket data is mostly not acquired by surveillance of users, though that is changing with the advemt of "alternative" data.