@Muad'zin:
I agree with your overall point about non-enforcement of antitrust; and while I'm Libertarian in my usual leanings it seems clear to me that our current situation begs for antitrust intervention if any example ever did. The tech oligopolies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon) are badly in need of a busting-up along lines distinguishing:
- content provision/curation vs. common-carrier content distribution
- marketplace/content infrastructure vs. the cloud services which supports them
- search/user-experience-preferences
- advertising/per-user-content-curation
- user-selected experiences and purchases (video content, text/book content, anything sold on Amazon, etc.)
...into different businesses, with prior relationships under one banner now acting as free agents, not necessarily servicing (or being serviced by) the groups which were previously different departments in the same company, but now are separate companies entirely.
The big risk of not doing this, it seems to me, is that "free speech" and "the marketplace of ideas" remain theoretically intact
de jure (inasmuch as the government can't prohibit your speech or you sharing ideas with others) but impossible to practice
de facto (because an unelected oligopoly can suppress content, search results, users, products, and businesses according to its whims, whether profit-driven or ideologically-driven). No free society can long claim to be a "free society" under such a regime.
The less-important risk is that it's a practical impossibility to challenge the big players for market-share in any segment where they're involved, because they
own all the infrastructure and support services that you need to use just to
do business. (For example, if all the major publishers of video content also are the only large-scale providers of video-streaming bandwidth, the only way you can launch a competing publishing business is by first launching an equal-or-better panoply of video-streaming scalable cloud services. If you don't, your only alternative is to buy your bandwidth
from your direct competitor. Good luck with that!)
I have to quibble about this sentence, though:
The Athenian democracy was more democratic than ours, yet it only lasted for less than 2 centuries...
Not sure I can go along with that comparison. I mean, "more democratic than ours" is true in
one way: It was direct, rather than representative, democracy. But for my money, that makes Athenian democracy an inferior form of government for any polity larger than, say, 5,000 persons. (For
larger societies, give me a Subsidiarist Separated-Powers Constitutional Democratic Republic any day!)
Granted, there's
another way one might interpret the phrase "more democratic" (breadth of the franchise); but on that score, I think the modern U.S. wins. (In Athens, only adult male free citizens had the vote...so, after excluding women and slaves only about 30% of the population.)
I get that those distinctions aren't critical to what you were saying. It's just that the phrase "more democratic" kinda jumped out at me.
As for "less than 2 centuries": Yeah, to hear de Toqueville and Montesquieu talk, Republics rarely last longer than about 200 years. It isn't some Law of Nature that makes it that way, so it's not unreasonable to think we can stretch ours out a bit longer. But what are we to do about our population's lack of civic virtue, requisite habits, and basic understanding of what free societies are for and what their governments are supposed to do (and not do)...and more than anything, the constant appeal to sentiment over logic in moral and political discourse?
It's hard to maintain optimism, sometimes. "If you can keep it,"
indeed.
