I wrote this on my personal community, but the topic seems appropriate to the discourse of the Ember community. Let me know your thoughts.

So I've been thinking, should businesses be allowed to buy out other businesses? I know that sounds a bit odd to question, especially as a free market advocate, but consider the goal of capitalism to be the creation and maintenance of perfectly competitive markets. Again, this is the goal of capitalism, not corporations, from a societal standpoint. As such, diversification of markets is essential, meaning consolidation directly moves the markets away from their goal competitiveness.

There is the thought process of considering corporations as states. See, if a corporation is able to determine their own terms of service and act independently, and then they can determine both the conduct of their employees and customers. If they grow large enough, they can buy out companies and force their terms onto those prior competitors. This also applies to companies in other markets. See, governments tend to get in the way when companies buy other companies within the same markets to the point where they can potentially become monopolies (though this is in theory and not really practices, when you look at markets like cell service where, in a basically 4 man show between AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, T-Mobile was able to merge with Sprint) so there is theoretically monopoly protection there; however, companies, as shown with Big Tech, can invest into virtually as many companies as they want that are considered "out of market" for them. In this way, they can extend their terms and conditions across multiple markets, and, with enough scale, can influence everyone within a country, or, potentially, the world. The companies terms become the law of their services, and there are no lawyers within that system. Unless they break local law, there is nothing you can do, and the contract is one sided, as the user gets no say in the creation, implementation, or updating of the terms of service. With enough scale, a corporation's influence can become a societal norm, and to not utilize any of their services, or to be banned from them, would effectively be a black mark on your "social credit".

Now, I am not saying we are at this point by any means. However, despite peoples frequent complaints about Facebook, I was often met with surprise and a bit of a weird look when I mentioned actually deleting mine to my friends. That "Oh, that's weird" or "Oh, you can do that?" type of response. Purely anecdotal, but I think it states to the influence that some companies have over culture. As these companies continue to grow outward, and avoid the claims of monopoly thanks to their maintenance of each other as "competitors", their influence can grow more and more rapidly. Alphabet themselves make enough money every day to buy up multiple start-ups that have the potential for growth in new markets.

Anyhow, I was just considering some thoughts on the topic of business influence, and businesses growing their power beyond their immediate product. I feel as though there needs to be a curb to prevent markets from losing their freedom. Especially in the wake of what happened to Parler, and the continued cultural alienation of right leaning groups, activists, and even laymen, I feel there is a consideration to free markets that may not have been so considered when establishing our philosophy on what makes a market free. The power of a single institution now can wield the financial and social influence of a small country, or even the social influence of a large one, if not more, and that can effectively remove the freedom from the markets themselves.