Monopoly of Ideas?

It was very interesting to read the article titled “Antitrust Can’t Bust a Monopoly of Ideas” in the WSJ today. I agree with most of their conclusions, however I see a very serious flaw.

None of the big tech’s products are free. They build and use many different goods that are withdrawn from their customers. They give you your daily digital bread for free that you would pay $2 for. What they do on the other hand is that they withdraw your right to see the big picture by letting only the biggest customers pay for the marketing statistics, prognosis or insights. They also prevent you to connect to anyone by using opaque “algorithms” to enforce “rules” like shadow banning and group people by arbitrary standards. They invite you to trust a brand but you will never know what is behind, who gets (or steals) your information. You do not get the chance to review and prove whether what you see or read is is right.

The new currency is data. You get your daily digital bread from tech but you do not get the information where to buy or sell a cheesecake. Nobody has a monopoly of ideas but big tech has the monopoly to make it impossible to market progress limiting GDP growth.