[kibwen]

This is normal. Markets tend towards consolidation because of the beneficial effects of economies of scale. Absent outside intervention, monopoly is the natural end state of a market. Sometimes this intervention comes naturally (tech changes, consumer tastes change, companies randomly implode), but where it doesn't, it's the government's role to periodically reset the market to a competitive state. This is necessary to have efficient markets.

[ragebol]

Network effect is another cause for consolidation in the case of the current tech giants.

[seec]

I wish more people understood this. You can't go full communist top-down economy because it will inevitably lead to sub-optimal and inefficient solution. But full-blown competition will inevitably lead to a "mega" winner, because over time he can use his superior efficiency/technology (whatever advantage makes him better) to buy or starve the competition. In the end when the market is finally dominated by a few players you tend to lose the benefits of efficiency of scale because they abuse their position to raise prices, collude and whatnot. So, something needs to be done eventually.

I think there are 2 "solutions" to try: - breaking up a company once it becomes too big; separating the various business it operates, so that they cannot have unfair advantage of consolidation and competitors have a better chance (it's easy to "win" when you can subsidize one branch losses with another high margins...) - preventing them from becoming so big in the first place by forbidding them to buy any other business. If they have to grow organically it would take lots more time, require more ressource from the main business and take years to be competitive. I never understood why we let some companies swallow another just because it has the money. Companies with too much cash on hand are pointing at an economic inefficiency and it just means they should be taxe more because they are stealing too much ressources from the world.

Anyway, we end up in those situations because we assume a lot of things that are just plain wrong, in the first place the notion that the pie just gets bigger. It's fundamentally false because ressource are limited (natural ressources, numbers of humans, total available time, etc). When you make runners compete, you give all of them a single, similar lane; you don't just let a single runner push everyone out of a single lane... But the second case is exactly how our economy works...