> First kill the big corporations, then think about fair laws.

It's not possible to kill big corporations before fair laws, because as you said yourself "corporations are already above the law"

Unfair laws don't apply to big corporations, they only apply to the people opposed to big corporations

It's akin to hamstringing a horse and saying you'll fix it when they win

Anti-Trust laws are a little different though. It's specifically about bringing giant corps down a peg, and has been used multiple times against companies that otherwise skirt the law quite a bit.

Standard Oil, AT&T, the railroads, all thought they were above the law, for good reason, but they were all still broken.

Not going to happen for 4 years at least.

Perhaps they just did, or we are doing it - basically this should lead to abolition of copyright to any published article there is. Not sure how’d it impact open source, we’ll either have all of it open, or none at all.

Even without copyright there are trade secrets, not to mention trademarks and patents. Maybe we could get rid of the latter, but I think we’d need to be pretty heavily into socialist utopia before considering nixing the former two!

Trademarks and patents are very different from copyright. Trademarks especially so because they aren't designed to "own" knowledge, just to prevent confusion about who made a product or what it is.

"Intellectual property" is an abomination of a term because it conflates 3 separate mechanisms with differing goals, pretending that they're related in any meaningful sense.

Patents protect a process. Trademarks protect identity. Copyright protects knowledge. Disparate mechanisms for disparate goals.

> Copyright protects knowledge.

Not at all. I am amazed by how badly copyright is understood.

You can buy a physics book, learn about physics from it, and use that knowledge somewhere else. That's totally legal, an copyright doesn't prevent you from doing that at all.

My country believes in this "intellectual property" thing so much that our copyright, patent and trademark act's name translates to "An Act on Intellectual and Artistic Works".

We need different perspective to copyright. Besides - what is a trade secret 10, 20, 30 years ago is a common wiki article now… very often if not always.

The idea of people owning information is really beyond comprehension for me. There’s no patent for ideas, only for mechanisms or implementations.

Besides we’re already tossing world’s knowledge in our palms, all the copy shit seems so irrelevant.

I’m not against closed source or keeping trade secrets. But once a story becomes public it should be accessible at no cost or else we get where we are atm.

Copyright does not protect knowledge. If you can write a full OS from scratch, Microsoft will not come sue you because they had the knowledge before.

> When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.

The only distinction between corporations and governments is one of them are morally bankrupt arbiters of force.

If that's the only distinction you see, then you don't really understand the concept of "government".

How do you suggest making them smaller?

For instance, what if google was still just serving search results w/ ads, and they never expanded that. How would you make them smaller?

I recommend Jason Furman's work for the practical mechanisms by which unnatural monopolies can be broken up and natural monopolies can be regulated.

On the other hand, you are interested in why the status quo isn't an accident and what we would need to do to accomplish those things, I recommend reading Reid Hoffman's book "Blitzscaling" side-by-side with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's book "Winner-Take All Politics": you can see the same dynamics presented in two very different lights.

Then they'd already be smaller, so there's no reason to make them smaller. Or am I misunderstanding your question?

Okay, they would be smaller, but you said "big corporations should not be able to exist" and they would already be a big corporation with just search--they started this way.

Or, just to follow it through, let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget. What will you do to make them smaller? Why?

I have a big problem with Google & Meta, and I can understand arguments about those companies. But not just "big companies" as a generality.

But that's how everyone speaks now. "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"

I'm not sure if you're in good faith, but I will assume that you are.

> "Literally every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah"

Nope. Not every billionaire is evil and exploiting blah blah blah. But nobody deserves to be a billionaire, period.

> let's say "WidgetBoss LLC" makes a new Widget that every single human has to have, they become the biggest company ever by making one widget

Which hasn't happened because, obviously, it is not possible to become the biggest company ever by making something trivial.

It is not possible to promote your product by putting it at the top of the search results if you don't own the search engine.

It is not possible to get statistics about popular products in your webstore, copy them and put them at the top of the search results if you can't own both the webstore and the products.

It is not possible to force everybody to use your email provider in order to use their smartphone if you don't own both the email provider and the smartphone OS.

etc.

> When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states

I don’t know how you define powerful, but I highly doubt it is at that point.

> Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist.

Nor should big governments.

Nor should big countries, for that matter.

Economies of scale generate value

And monopolies do the opposite.