Thank you to you and the AI system of your choice for the question.
I've already touched on that false opposition that any form of regulation is going to get in the way of innovation. Something I come up against a lot in my research and my work is this idea that because there's not a government regulation, a market is ungoverned or the market is more free. All markets have rules; the question is whether those rules have been democratically set and are transparent.
Then, as you're saying, as you're trying to attract investment and say that companies should come here and compete, they know they're going to have a fair shot, or those rules can be set by private actors that become de facto regulators, and when that happens, as we've seen in digital markets, the rules are set in favour of the largest companies.
That's why so much of our e-commerce environment, which I think we still idealize as a free-ish market, is characterized by situations where large companies, but companies of all sizes, both own and operate in a marketplace, and that allows them to manipulate that marketplace. Of every dollar earned by independent sellers on Amazon, 48¢, or maybe 45¢, goes to Amazon.
Again, we look at those companies and say, “Man, why aren't they more productive? Why aren't they earning more?” When half of every dollar of revenue you own is going to an essentially junk fee that's been going up and up, maybe that's something that's getting in the way. Is that a free market? I don't think so.