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I can easily believe this being repeated for most of the Big Tech firms.

Bell was a government-granted monopoly. It was literally illegal to connect a 3rd party telephone to their network. Of course you need government intervention to fix a government-created mess.

All copyrights, patents, and trademarks are government-granted monopolies.

And patents do quite the damage to the free market. The theory is that they incentivize innovation - in reality innovation is incentivized quite enough by the perspective profits. Patents incentivize rent-seeking and playing the court system.

Copyrights and trademarks are important though to prevent fraud and deception. The government has the role of upholding the rule of law and gentlemanly competition - I am not advocating for anarchy.

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