[jrlevine]

I wholeheartedly disagree. Force doesn't always look like the point of a gun. More often than not it looks like court time and lawyers' fees.

See Hays Code censoring film from 1930-1968. See RCA tying up the FM radio patent for years in court and NBC blocking the emergence of Television. See consolidation in the radio industry limiting the number of participants in broadcasting.

Wu puts it nicely:

“If making yourself heard cannot be practically accomplished in an actual public square but rather depends upon some medium, and upon that medium is built an industry restricting access to it, there is no free market for speech.

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard.

But barriers in an information industry, trafficking as it does in expressive content, can represent more than a restraint on commercial aspirations; they can, depending on how crucially the information medium figures in a society’s communications, also restrain free speech."

Wu, Tim (2010). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Knopf. Kindle Edition.

[relic17]

Force is at the point of a gun, and only in that case you (or, rather, the government as your agent) should point a gun at it (or in a case of demonstrable fraud). A business which does not defraud you or physically force you to do anything can only have economic power. If you propose to point a gun at economic power (possibly because you think that the business in question is a monopoly), then the issue is much deeper. You would have to think about what justifies "compulsion", about the source of monopolies, and, fundamentally, about the rights of the businessmen who own and operate the businesses you have mind (as well as your own rights, which are the same). This is a serious thinking process, but one has to go through it to understand why Wu is wrong.

[jrlevine]

Your issue is with the government's right to enforce antitrust law, for which there is a long history showing why they should. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law

[relic17]

I do disagree with the anti-trust laws. I have taken a long hard look at anti-trust, both academically and professionally, and I think these laws are among the worst.

The whole issue is not economic, it is philosophical, about ethics - i.e. what is moral and what rights people have.

Mr. Wu, with whom you agree, goes well beyond anti-trust. For him, as long as a business is considered essential to the public good, that alone is enough to justify "compulsion" (see your first quote). Do you agree with that? Or would you try to prove (as hard as that can be) that Facebook and Google are monopolies first?

You say "we should vote with our attention", and I fully agree. This is a proper way to make a change. Another would be to write articles like the one you've just written, using your own means. Compulsion should be reserved for criminals.