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Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age


Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.

Private monopolies are undesirable as a rule and contemporary tech monopolists and oligopolists — in their sheer heft and reach — represent something even worse than their twentieth-century forebears. Governments around the world are trying once more to regulate the tech giants, aiming to curb their multinational corporate power and the technologies they deploy, often to great social and political damage. Only democratic control of massive tech companies can protect workers, consumers, and even states from the excesses and toxic actions of multinational corporate giants whose strategic interest and profit-maximizing tendencies produce negative externalities for the rest of us.

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