But people do in fact make their own small investments when they opt for one provider of a service or the other.
For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers.
If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.
That's true, but it misses the point. Capitalism and democracy work best when there is competition. Monopolies -- both economic and political -- generally lead to bad outcomes. When ultimate decision-making power becomes too unevenly distributed, it becomes very difficult to prevent monopolies from forming.
I don't know about other countries, but in America, being a monopoly is not at all outlawed. The criminality associable to monopoly here is when a monopoly abuses their monopoly power.
If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly, but I am not guilty of anything until and unless I attempt to exert my monopolistic influence to prevent competitors from taking my market share. If I am a pure monopoly, then it's possible that just running a loss-leading sale could result in antitrust violations, but if I am not a monopoly, or if I am a minority provider of widget x, then loss-leading sales are a presumptively lawful activity.
Edit: I believe closeparen makes this point more precisely with his post in this same topic:
> If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly
That's not what monopoly really means. Peter Thiel (for whom I have lots of criticism) makes these things really clear in the way he discusses them. You could open up a British Food restaurant somewhere and be the only one in town. That doesn't make you a monopoly because the actual market is for all types of dining. There's not specific British Food market that you've captured. When businesses want to taut their power and monopoly status (whether to delude themselves or to get investors or whatever), they will pretend that the market is as narrow as their particular product. When they want to convince regulators that they are just one in a competing market, they'll widen the market as much as possible…
The US hasn't enforced its anti-trust legislation in over 30 years. Some link Reagan's "assault" on anti-trust to the breakage of the American job market. There's been zero net job creation in the US between 1999 and 2009, a time which also saw significant consolidation.
Small businesses drive net job growth, and they are also more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms.
Not to mention, smaller businesses allow more people to own capital. I'm sick of economic discussions that focus on jobs and wages - ownership is what gets people out of serfdom.
But, little guys are feeling the squeeze. "The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit."
So, this isn't only about privacy, or the false perception that "big is evil." It's about economy as ecosystem. "Biodiversity" in the economy creates robustness against hard times and distributes resources in ways that allow many participants to thrive. Monocultures are extractive, and ultimately fragile.
> more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms
Patents are not correlated with innovation. Tons of innovative things are never patented, and the majority of patents are largely bullshit. The patent system mostly gives tons of money to patent lawyers and power to companies who know how to use their patents to threaten innovators.
It may be true that small businesses are more innovative, but we simply can't use patents as a measure of innovation.
Not only that, if you (only) have a large number of small investors, there will often be a lot of conflicting ideologies and interests, sometimes diametrically opposed. Hard for a company to have any long-term direction that way.
Why talk in terms of one big company? Maybe small investors with conflicting ideas and interests would like to own and run small companies. Except, a couple of big companies are making that very difficult.
For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers.
If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.