More specifically, they should just break these huge corporations up. Better for everyone long term, except maybe their tax dodging share holders. Google has conflicts of interest competing against their own cloud customers, some of whom are also ad customers, with products that get preferential treatment on the same platforms. Same for MS. Same for Amazon. Same for Apple. They each have overlapping businesses that are used to subsidize other parts of their business and snuff out competition.
I understand that this is probably legal under the current system but there have been plenty of calls to change that system lately as it has been heavily pushed to its current shape through decades of lobbying & special interest. It's not normal for corporations to dwarf most of the nations in the UN in terms of GDP. That's not a free market anymore but a form of corporate dictatorship.
> It's not normal for corporations to dwarf most of the nations in the UN in terms of GDP.
It has been, actually, normal for there to be corporations with revenue dwarfing the GDP of most nations on Earth (the UN is a recent distraction) for nearly as long as joint stock corporations have been a thing.
Largely because GDP isn't exactly equally distributed among countries; the median GDP of a country on Earth right now is only in the neighborhood of $15 billion, which is in the neighborhood of the GDP of a quite small city in the developed world.
> That's not a free market anymore
“Free market” is a non-existent abstract ideal, not a thing that actually exists or can exist.
It is totally normal for corporations to dwarf nations in GDP. Corporations are far less powerful now then they used to be - during colonial times the british east india company was not only larger than many countries, it actually had it's own army twice the size of the british army and invaded and colonized and controlled many countries. If we're talking about corporate dictatorship, it's been far far far far worse than google competing with their own customers.
I don't know about that. As someone who has worked for some of the big companies, there's a ton of efficiency gains in being able to use a common set of internal tools and software that these companies have and while the public clouds have externalized a lot of those internal tools, they haven't externalized all of them yet nor would you benefit from the common set of software reuse.
I understand that this is probably legal under the current system but there have been plenty of calls to change that system lately as it has been heavily pushed to its current shape through decades of lobbying & special interest. It's not normal for corporations to dwarf most of the nations in the UN in terms of GDP. That's not a free market anymore but a form of corporate dictatorship.