Telecom and the like are the same, competition leads to fragmentation and destruction of opportunity. Monopolies lead to bad platforms, but platforms that hit the scale divided and broken half solutions never will.
I’m way more concerned by Facebook in terms of monopoly, because here I truly don’t have a choice between products, just to opt out with social consequences. That’s not the case with search or email.
Google is an ad company; their product is an audience and an advertising system. There is no reason that advertising should be untouchable except at scale. There are plenty of tiny players who eke out a profitable existence at small scale with ads. It is likely there is a path from there up into a mega-giant if someone really goes to look for it.
If anything, advertising might suffer diseconomies of scale for most products. Small businesses want to advertise locally.
Advertising is the same way: The more opportunities you have to try matching a person with a thing they might like, the more you'll learn.
Google is on a scale that are likely two orders of magnitude more than their closest competitor.
Hilariously, Google is by far the best at mapping local people with local businesses, as they've mapped most commercial centers, and run heavy machine learning across them to extract information their competitors can't even hope to try for another decade.
Why I pay absurd amounts more for my healthcare, even when I can choose between several different insurance companies.
That's why my power in a massive center in California is completely unreliable here, I've experienced more power failures in the past year in a major city than I did in 30 years in the middle of fucking nowhere Canada.
Because competition makes it work.
That's why Mussolini got the trains to run on time. He also used them to ship all the Jews to concentration camps, but what's a few million lives compared to being slightly inconvenienced?
After Italy switches sides, and joined the Allies, the Germans, who quickly occupied northern Italy immediately started carrying out the Holocaust.
They were not very successful, because of resistance and non-cooperation by Italian civilian authorities. Less than 10% of Italy's jewish population died in the Holocaust. (Compared to 50% of Romania's, 90% of Poland's, 70% of Hungary's, 30% of Austria's, and 90% of Greece's)
The entire purpose of injecting capital in such large amounts is to prevent competition. That's literally the entire point.
Go to telecommunications and break the big players up and create marketplaces in which small players can innovate. Do it in news media and undo that awful communications act from 96 that led to industry concentration.
We need to take an activist attitude to anti-trust that actively seeks to create rabidly competitive markets which is what fuelled early tech's growth, instead of letting tech slide into the status quo.
And of course all of these companies will still have access to capital. They'll just need to convince investors that their product is better.