[murftown]

> you can choose what companies you interact with but you can't choose your government.

On the contrary, you can vote to change your government, but the corporations get to do what they want with 0 accountability. If they have a pseudo-monopoly (like several large tech companies do today), you can "choose" to use them or miss out on basic life services.

[idrios]

This is true, so I should have prefaced that part with 'in theory'. But companies that become a monopoly or pseudo-monopoly can be broken up by the government. The government cannot become broken up by companies.

The fact that these monopolies can exist is a failure of the government.

Some, like telecom companies, exist because they have ownership over a scarce resource (spectrum). I might argue that because of that scarcity, internet should be a function provided by the government and not private companies at all.

Others, like smartphone OS's (iOS vs Android), exist because they are years ahead of any competition, and then entrench themselves by using custom parts and protocols. In an ideal world, there would be an OS-agnostic language for developing mobile apps, just as web pages are (mostly) browser-agnostic. Likewise, as manufacturing parts gets cheaper hopefully it becomes easier for tech enthusiasts to build their own phones with an open source OS. The government should have a role to facilitate this outcome.

But yes, monopolies leave us helpless