Right. It has been a historical concern of antitrust that once you have significant economic power, that could translate into political power, and you then create policies that promote the dominant firm.
Yesterday in class we talked about the DuPont case, which is an antitrust case. There, DuPont was very successful in erecting tariffs on cellophane to protect its dominant share in the market. There is no doubt that you could probably cite examples of that as well. There was concern that you could then start creating policies that help protect the dominance.
The unusual thing about these data-opolies is when it starts coming to surveillance. I was recently in Hong Kong giving a similar talk, and one of the concerns there was how the government is getting data from these private data-opolies to help create a credit score on consumers—like a general sort of citizen score—to better monitor and track them and the like. They're basically co-operating with these data-opolies. You have a relationship whereby they're providing data to the government, and then the government is providing favours to the company. This is a historical concern with a new twist.