The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That's why they switched to Chromium.
Oh... so to answer your question no one is "allowing" a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You're free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you'll do it you'll probably just use Chromium.
Politics - I'm banned because of my username, but plenty of subscribers. Interestingly I can't figure out how to contact a moderator to get unbanned. The information page doesn't list who the moderators are. I had a similarly "offensive" name on Reddit for a decade and never got banned from r/politics
askreddit - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
Android - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
Linux - plenty of subscribers on Lemmy
Economics - maybe a post or two a day
When I go back to Reddit, on desktop, all of those are operating as they normally do, with no perceptible change on the amount of posts.
There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)
Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn't matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don't give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.
We can't incentivize people to change their behavior because no one is going to deliberately lower their quality of life.
What politician is going to win on a platform of...
Let's make air travel so expensive that normal people can no longer regularly fly!
Vote for me I'm going to double your electricity bill!
You know that big SUV you love that is entirely impractical but you just like it because of how big it is... If you vote for me I'll make gas $7 a gallon so that you can't afford to have a giant SUV anymore.
You know how you like to eat your Taco Bell nachos in your car with a plastic spork... If you vote for me I'll replace the plastic spork with a cornstarch spork that starts to melt when you use it.
The only thing that is going to save us is technology. Like air travel being fueled by biofuels, electricity costs kept somewhat normal by building new nuclear generation, giant SUVs being powered by batteries charged by nuclear/renewable energy, actually recycling the plastic spork.
I'd be willing to bet that 80% of the people that have a very intense emotional reaction to the small town song live in the suburbs less than 20 to 30 minutes away from whatever city they work in.
Actual small towns like that have less than a couple thousand people suck ass. There's nothing to do there and no jobs and that's why people leave.
"I'm stopping the insane prosecution of marijuana today. I'm ordering Justice, FBI, DEA, all federal agencies to not prosecute anything related to marijuana. The IRS, SEC, FTC can treat marijuana businesses like any other business."
Republican governors or AGs or a sheriff in some shithole state or whatever sue.
The Federalist Society court says your can't do that.
Biden says I'm doing it anyway.
The House impeaches him. It goes to the Senate and a few Democrats turn on him drawing widespread condemnation from the liberal media and Democratic base - Why are you trying to keep throwing people in jail or getting them fired for weed? The vote is far short of 2/3rds and he's still president.
It's sort of impossible for Republicans to run against this other than "It's an abuse of power! He's a dictator!" because even a majority of Republicans support marijuana legalization and they're sort of the boy who cried wolf when it comes to the dictator claim.
Biden says "I had to take action. We can't keep putting people in prison for a mostly harmless drug that is legal in 2/3rds of the country. I'd love for a permanent solution to make it's way through Congress. I'm ready to sign it."
???
WW3
What is step 8?
They could call it DAPS - Deferred Action for Pot Smokers (joke).
If you don't show them you're capable of not voting for them they don't have to listen to you. I promise you that. I worked within the Democratic Party. I didn't listen or have to listen to anything on the left while I was working in the Democratic Party - because the left had nowhere to go.
What is the flaw in that reasoning? If I want Medicare for All and a neolib like Mayo Pete or Joe Brandon is the candidate and they don't want Medicare for All, how does guaranteeing them my vote anyway get me Medicare for All? How do I punish them or otherwise push them my way other than refusing to vote for them?
Maybe the "moderate" Democrats that are indifferent or opposed to Medicare for All (I'm just using it as an example issue) should keep in mind that if they don't support a progressive candidate progressives aren't going to show up to vote and they'll lose?
If you're going to wait for Congressional action to do any of that stuff, in our anti-majoritarian system that is stacked against the Democratic party, then you're going to be waiting multiple decades at least.
Just take the Supreme Court for example. Let's say their was some sort of huge political/cultural shift and the median Congressman was Bernie Sanders - unless we get lucky and a few Supremes die, then there will be Federalist Society veto on progressive legislation even a decade or two or three from now.
All of these changes will have to be shoved through the executive branch somehow. The Supreme Court will have to be ignored.
Or we'll just have to wait a generation or two or more. The climate change stuff can't wait.
Biden could just pick a different mechanism (i.e. not the emergency declaration) and do student loan forgiveness again.
He could just ignore the court's ruling. Seems like a very low priority thing to start a constitutional crisis for, but he could do it if he wanted to.
I don't care about student loan forgiveness that much. I don't even have student loans. It's just indictive of everything else he's failed on.
I'm not going to suck his dick because he got Medicare drug prices negotiation (on five specific drugs starting a year or two from now) or a $7500 tax credit on an EV I still can't afford even with a $7500 tax credit or a $1400 stimulus check that he said would be $2000 and Trump indicated he wanted to do as well or an infrastructure bill that I can't really specifically point to anything it's doing.
Here is what a normal, not political, not terminally online person thinks: Biden was elected and nothing in my life has gotten better. Everything seems more expensive.
Medicare for All (or at least substantially improving the ACA or some other mechanism of making health care cheaper)
Card check (or how about just not fucking over the rail workers?)
Paid paternal/family/sick leave
Guaranteed vacation time
$15/hr min wage
Student loan forgiveness
Free/reduced price college
Free/reduced price childcare
Child tax credit
Expanding the earned income tax credit
Medicare being able to negotiate drug prices (all drug prices now, not five different drugs a couple years from now)
Marijuana legalization
Universal Pre-K
Some sort of substantive action on climate change - for example: "We're going to build 20 new nuclear plants in the next 10 years." - "ICE vehicle sales will be mostly banned after 2035." - "We're going to build 15 new 1000 megawatt or bigger offshore wind farms and we've bypassed the normal red tape so they're starting to be built right now."
Some sort of substantive action on housing being expensive - maybe withhold federal funds from states/municipalities that don't relax their zoning for more and multi unit building. Maybe have the federal government directly start building stuff.
Etc...
We did get that tax credit that brings down the cost of an EV to a price most Americans still can't afford, so that's good. (Sarcasm)
Marijuana legalization polls at like 70%+ including a majority of Republican voters and still zero movement there for some reason. Among Democrats it's like 80%.
The problem seems so bad I'm surprised they haven't passed a law that just bypasses environmental regulations and other red tape along with telling the towns and cities to go fuck themselves when it comes to zoning.
Or even just having the government directly build houses.
Or just throwing tax credits and incentives ar builders to build "starter" or lower income housing.
Or anything. It just seems like they're doing jack shit about it.
The neoliberals can't blame this one on Republicans considering Democrats have control of the entire state.
Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.
About half the population already owns a home so they're immune to this problem.
The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.
Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.
If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we're in a depression.