[itairal]

This is the problem.

How is your life better with having Standard Oil broke up in 1911? We didn't get to see the counterfactual of Rockefeller strangling the oil industry by 1920.

Big tech though has gone beyond the definition of a monopoly. We didn't breakup Standard Oil because we were worried about them taking over the garment industry too.

I imagine we already pay for big tech dearly as a society but we can't run reality a 1000 times over to see the alternatives. We basically run the Windows 11 version of society and since we can't actually have a different experience we conclude "hey this Windows 11 society isn't that bad, how would any of this improve my Windows 11 life?".

If we could actually see the alternate paths this would be the biggest political issue in democracies by a mile. Instead we have big tech controlling what people see and read almost entirely so of course this is no big deal. Big tech told me so!