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Comment by VoxPelli | Hacker News Reader

These records sure doesn’t play in their favor when it comes to investigations of being harmful to the competitive environment.

One could ask the questions:

Should any single (non-state?) entity be this large?

Is it overall better to have innovation and production concentrated like this or would society benefit from increased plurality?

I don’t know, but numbers like these sure makes me wonder

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It’s not like a powerful state is harmless. Ask all of the countries where the US tried to “bring Democracy”.

No, but they are much more complicated and their size are determined by many more factors, so discussing whether they should be powerful or not is an entirely different conversation

Should any state entity be this large?

> Should any single (non-state?) entity be this large?

I interpreted this as “should any non-state entity” have more power than the state?

My initial thoughts are that if the particular state in question is a working, liberal democracy apparatus, then it is probably best that it has more power than a non-elected, non-representative entity (whether or not said entity is for-profit, like a corporation, or non-profit, such as a church).

States are what states are, it’s more complicated when it comes to sizes there as it has to do with territory, democracy etc.

So I didn’t try to relate companies to states, I just wanted to exclude the states from the discussion altogether.

Yep. That’s why I replied because the parent comment (to my comment) doesn’t appear to me to advance the conversation.

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