they forgot what actual competition is

That’s an accurate diagnosis. U.S. big tech companies all follow the same playbook: use VC to buy off or price-dump to death all of your competitors. Become a monopoly. Then enshittify and extract the maximum amount of wealth from b2b and retail customers by increasing the cost of your services.

Any sane country would have drowned these companies in anti-trust cases and carved them up. But political leadership at the time was too high on neoliberal free market ideology and the fairytales these self-styled “tech geniuses” wove around themselves. Now big tech has effectively bought off the U.S. government.

They’re in for a nasty surprise when they find out that the U.S. is not the world, and the rest of the world can do pretty well without the U.S…

In short, standard monopolistic rent-seeking.

Exactly. Dominance is earned by building products people genuinely prefer, not by making alternatives harder to reach. Every restriction becomes an incentive for competitors to innovate faster. If the US had focused on winning through better models, stronger companies, and real competition instead of political leverage, it would probably be in an even stronger position today.

There’s a bit of is/should conflation going on there.

Regulatory capture is a business strategy.

Agreed.