> But apparently they can be dodged with a truckload of political contributions.

I like your rage. I think it's mis-targetted though. In the Reagan era, Supreme Court nominee & Nixon criminal Robert Bork got put in charge of the FTC, and re-defined Anti-Trust to only apply when consumer prices went up. Any other kind of monopoly was ok. Because of this, the FTC hasn't has a regulatory basis to manage jack nor shit for 40 years. This isn't just the typical dump-truck-loads full of money problem: this is a 4 decade old crisis of the government being unable and unwilling to govern.

Cory Doctorow has many great threads on this all, but here's two:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/#zucked

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork

America needs to unwind the damage of Borkism, & start trying to regulate itself. Right now, we cannot.

Worth remembering that Paul Graham defended the Facebook/Instagram merger as the expected, non-malicious outcome of a healthy startup economy - see under the heading "Understand" in http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html .

I'm inclined to believe that Paul Graham understands the startup economy well, and therefore that this isn't a problem unique to regulating Facebook, this is a problem that will keep happening, in many ways, if regulators / lawmakers leave the startup economy as it is.

I feel like this is a variation of the Two Generals Problem, but instead of it being about communication, it's about accountability:

"You have many people. One of these people gains more power than the rest. They can abuse that power, so there needs to be someone to monitor that power, but _that_ person can abuse power. How do you effectively hold everyone accountable about abuses of power without requiring that absolutely everyone become a regulator to create a loop?"

I think the situation you are outlining is most aptly described by the Roman proverb: "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Funny how a crude joke about someone's wife liking to sleep around almost two thousand years ago gets applied to a conversation about legal frameworks and regulation of one of the most significant corporations in the 21st century world.