Reasonably, too. Governments seem reluctant to actually regulate anti-competitive behavior these days, especially from tech giants. I think it must be a kind of technological "too big to fail".
Microsoft was still big even back then, and yet they got regulated. Bell/AT&T was also a giant monopoly and it also got broken up. It seems that size wasn't the problem.
The lack of will to regulate seems to scale with industry lobbing.
I used to hope we consumers would stop reelecting corruption. We never did and now we're too busy trying to keep even worse people getting into office.
We are now at a point that billionaires openly make unilateral decisions about foreign and defence policy with little discussion in public eyes, let alone checks and balances.
We need anti-Establishment players who are already willing to confront these billionaires by cutting off their influence completely, rather than taxing them more — which is useless, and conveniently replaces their contributions with tax dollars that can be used for the same manipulation strategies.
The bad news is, any criticism of these particular billionaires results in synthesized media campaigns crying wolf about anti-Semitism or anti-science, which causes the public to become distracted over manufactured culture wars, while the root issues go unchecked and the politicians willing to confront these billionaires are smeared, drawn, and quartered by the same media and voters who wouldn't dare to think outside their box.
Billionaires in the USA are completely and totally beholden to the military-industrial complex, for the most part. Look how they all scrambled for JEDI, for example.
The US military alone spends the entire net worth of the richest private person in 17 weeks, wealth it took him 30-ish years to accumulate; that's not counting the rest of government spending. There's an argument that any senator is "richer" than the richest private person in the country. It's not even the same ballpark.
Did you have specific instances in mind?
Also IE was the dominant browser back then, which it is not today, but windows itself is on the desktop. So I think it is abusing monopoly, but instead of trying to regulate it, EU should make a push for open source. Maybe fund it with a big fine for Microsoft. That would be EU politics I could engage with.
As an aside, I don't think anyone realistically thinks MS is failing if you're able uninstall edge.
True. US states are ramping up production of tech laws but those laws typically fall into two categories. Laws that only large tech houses can afford and/or unconstitutional reactionary laws.
At best these laws do no good for the consumer. They absolutely do nothing do encourage competition.
Most of them, however, bring tons of harm like gifting abusable power to govs and helping big tech further entrench their dominance.
The EU seems happy to stick to it’s guns, though the rest of us seem to have to suffer the deluge of sewage.
