[j1elo]

So does this constitute an example that the liberal ideal of companies competing for the best product -with no or minimal amount of public money forced to go this way for public development- ends up becoming basically a miserable and lacking experience for end users during decades? (admittedly it sounds to me like if private companies had invented TCP-IP, the consequences would basically be terrible connectivity products nowadays)

[thewebguyd]

I don't necessarily think so. It doesn't have to be this way. The problem is big tech doesn't have any incentive to compete to make the best product because there's no market pressure to do so.

We've failed, over the past ~25+ years to do any meaningful trust busting and allowed monopolies and duopolies to abuse their market positions and destroy any potential competitors.