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While it is true that scale brings certain advantages, larger companies are not an unalloyed good. For instance:

- larger companies can leverage near-monopoly status to prevent meaningful competition, increase rates, etc. (e.g. Verizon/AT&T/Comcast)

- larger companies can collude to drive the price of labor down. (e.g. tech anti-poaching pact.)

- one large company, by being "more efficient", may in fact employ fewer people than your ten smaller companies combined, especially if they are able to invest in large-scale automation initiatives.

- larger companies have a wider view of your activity, making them a single point of failure for personal privacy. (e.g. national security letters, NSA datacenter tapping.)

To paraphrase the parent comment: just because one company can unite the services of ten doesn't mean that it's beneficial.

A large company doesn't equate to a monopoly. Multiple giant companies can duke it out (and they do). I'm arguing against the idea that small companies are objectively better.

I would certainly prefer a large mobile provider with service around the world (of which there are many) than a small provider operating out of my city. I would prefer a large ride-sharing app (of which there are at least two) with coverage in most major cities instead of installing 10 different local apps for the same purpose.

I'm not arguing that big companies are better, but I am arguing there are certain benefits to large companies that operate around the world (as long as there's competition).

If the ten companies interoperated, you could plan a cross-continent vacation using one website instead of searching for each city's/country's version of it. (And then you wouldn't be vulnerable to Airbnb, for example, demanding access to your Google Docs metadata in order to allow you to continue using their service.) You're making the argument that people used to make about how it would be impractical to have multiple long-distance phone companies or multiple long-distance computer networking companies.

This is nothing like the phone lines -- the FCC isn't going to come in and force them to play nice, and these companies are not going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

The big players will just starve out the little ones. AirBNB isn't infrastructure, it's a service. Without a complete socialist re-imagining of society, that will never happen.

The FCC isn't forcing Level3 or Global Exchange or AOL to "play nice" either. You're apparently arguing from a complete ignorance of history, and consequently your prescribed remedy is likely to make the situation worse instead of better.

The internet evolved over the phone lines, where providers were legally banned from blocking traffic. They were made to play nice. The fact we still have a free internet is the result of that legacy.

While I agree that common carrier obligations helped the internet significantly, your picture of history is still mostly wrong, and the particle of truth in it is drastically oversimplified. The internet didn't evolve over phone lines. Phone-line providers weren't legally banned from blocking traffic, and in fact did legally block data traffic over phone lines for decades. Common carrier obligations didn't exist in most of the countries where we have a free internet, and have never been relevant to most of the participants in the internet: not to AlohaNet, not to ARPANet, not to Mindvox, not to Netcom, not to UUNET, not to AOL, not to Level3, not to Global Crossing, certainly not to JANET, not to NSFNet, and not to The Little Garden.

Rather, the internet was created by an academic-military coalition that had sufficient political power to overcome the phone companies' and regulators' opposition to data networking.

It's plain that you weren't on com-priv then, you aren't on NANOG or equivalent now, and you haven't read the history.

> If the ten companies interoperated, you could plan a cross-continent vacation using one website

It's not easy. Why and how would they interoperate? What stops any one of them to grow and expand to other countries?

Thank you very much for actually trying to understand what I was getting at.

It's a thorny subject because it very quickly can turn into a political or ideological discussion. I was trying to avoid as much as possible because I think it needs some debate no matter what the conclusion might be.

So, essentially, you're arguing monopolies are the most desireable outcome of capitalism?

Thank you. The knee-jerk belief that small business is always better is profoundly un-historical.

Most of the greatest inventions of the past 100 years have come from large businesses that had the man-power and capital to invest in significant R&D departments.

Like I said below; AMD and Intel have a duopoly on x86 processors and have for ages. Intel's profit margins waver between 1/4 and 1/3 of revenue. Simultaneously, processors get better and cheaper every single year.

> Most of the greatest inventions of the past 100 years have come from large businesses that had the man-power and capital to invest in significant R&D departments.

Your narrative leaves out the huge sums of public dollars that underpinned those innovations.