As an American myself, I feel like this is true. You can almost pick any one industry. The government has been weak in anti-trust law for a while. The result is you might look at an industry and see that yeah there's 3-5 competitors... but what did it used to be? Dozens. With so few competitors I fear the price-fixing and customer/employee abuse is easier than ever. If you have 3 major phone providers, one can just raise their prices and the others can follow suit without their being any explicit collusion. Some of the more egregious to me are utility companies and internet providers. We can say all we want that Cable Co. has competition within America; the reality is that most residences only actually have one choice for a provider--take it or leave it. There's this unspoken agreement to not compete so that they each can maintain high prices within their respective markets.
I think the last conversation about AI bring up an interesting point. Some of these monopolistic practices are more noticeable now because of the AI arms race. These already massive companies are using their wealth to buyout AI rather than building up their own and competing in the market. In the end, consumers lose.
With regard to Amazon, well, that's always been a tough one. Relevant bits for me would be the ability to keep a book in KU while not having to maintain exclusivity per Kindle Select, and the ability to price books lower on other platforms without Amazon forcing price matching. On a $3.99 ebook, you could price it about $0.90 cheaper on a platform with say, a 90% royalty to earn the same as you would for Amazon's 70%. Maybe price it slightly higher to still beat Amazon's price and also get more money per sale than what Amazon offers.
This is what a lot of the kerfuffle is about with the Epic Games Store and iOS. I really don't know where we draw the line in deciding something is monopolistic, or what contracts should be illegal (regardless of size). Exclusivity deals have always been a thing, and I think it will be hard to get rid of them as a whole, for instance.
These companies have reached a size where innovation generally doesn't matter, which is what the buyouts in AI showcase. I think it's also why we see a lot of these massive US companies spread overseas and become world dominating forces (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) As much as I do like some parts of America, I don't want the entire world to turn into it. That's why I find things like Canada's CRTC law requiring 35% of radio broadcasts to be by Canadian artists interesting. I feel like social media apps (TikTok, Instagram, etc.) have the ability to greatly influence foreign countries just by tweaking algorithms. That's a dangerous power ... but I digress.
If you give it enough time and lack of oversight, we'll be right back to company towns.
