> Google and Apple have more power than most nations.
And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.
The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.
Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence. I would hope you'd agree those are not powers that we should grant to large corporations...
I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them accountable.
>Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence.
A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again, which they can afford to do because it's such a small market. Exercising arbitrary power is not the trump card you think it is. Hell, even a tiny nation with reasonable but annoying (from the point of view of a corporation) laws may not be worth it to deal with.
> > Even the smallest nations have the legal right to permanently incarcerate, strip you of your assets or even murder you if you are in their sphere of influence.
> A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again
Or more. If some small state decides to officially murder a US tourist while he never broke a local law, I do believe the public outcry would make the US government do more than just stop doing buisness.
True "some small state fallacy" please. And here I believe it matters if we are talking about some small state, or a small state that happens to be a close ally with lots of influence for various reasons.
So companies naturally grow big. The bigger they are, the easier for them to compete.
Big companies have access to tremendous resources, so they can push laws by bribing law makers, advertising their agenda to the masses.
There's no way around it, not without dismantling capitalism. Nations will serve to the corporations, no other way around.
There are natural boundaries of the growth scale, which are related to the inherent efficiency of communications between people and overall human capability. Corporations are controlled by people and people have limited brains and mouths. I feel that with AI development, those boundaries will move apart and allow for even greater growth eventually.
Yes there is, the population passing laws to regulate this. The problem is though, that most people don't understand and don't care enough until its too late.
This is dogma, not proven fact, and most people that argue this tend to use self-serving metrics and a tailored definition of "efficient". Some counterexamples: early Google was much more efficient in responding to market changes than the current top-heavy organization; small hospitals tend to have better health outcomes (both per patient and per dollar) than large chains. Tesla was able to innovate much faster than established behemoths.
I think you mean "nimble", "versatile", or "agile". None of these imply efficiency in the same sense economy of scale does (ie cost to produce a single deliverable unit).
There are good examples, though—you can produce a single gold ring a lot cheaper than you can produce a one-of-a-trillion of them, cuz at some point you simply run out of gold. Another example is running into a cap in demand. Classic sigmoid vs exponential patterns.
And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.
The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.