ONE OF THE few things that most people in the West agree on is that there is some kind of problem with the big tech firms. Here is a list of common complaints. They have high market shares and concentrated ownership so that tycoons mainly benefit from their growth, cause addiction, censor free speech, do not censor free speech, are infiltrated by Russian spies, suck up to Chinese autocrats, do not pay customers for their data, give private data to third parties, refuse to give data to third parties, don't invest much, bully their critics, underpay workers, poach too many experts from universities, pay too little tax and corrupt politics. Some of these are directly about competition. In other cases the link is tangential. For example, if customers had good alternatives perhaps they would switch from today's firms when the companies behave badly. Often there is no link to competition at all.
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