Increasingly Monopolistic Behavior and the Centralization of Industry
This piece of satire from The Onion says it all:
Well, I Guess I’ll Just Take My Business To Another Soulless Multinational Corporation
The first step in rebelling against the control of large corporations begins with a wholesale change in the attitude of consumers. Rather than “going with the flow” and accepting the terms dished out to us by big box stores or the one-sided adhesion contracts of cell phone carriers, cable TV providers, gyms and so forth, consumers need to begin asserting their power, as a group, to bring giant corporations down to size.
Although it may no longer feel like the consumer has any say in the marketplace, large corporations still depend on consumers to survive. The problem is that corporations are so large now that to affect them through boycott takes either a high level of organization or a major shift in consumer trends.
Consumer trends are a product of changing attitudes. One product like cigarettes goes into decline, while another product like the iPhone ascends. In an ideal marketplace, where the products on the shelves are EXACTLY what consumers have been demanding, the balance of power between business and consumer tilts towards the consumer. But that is NOT what is happening on our store shelves. Instead, corporations invent products that were never asked for and then spend millions of dollars on marketing to convince the consumer they want it.
How does this differ from the old Soviet model where a select few manufacturers produce all the goods and consumers are stuck with what is on the shelves? A central tenet of capitalism is that a niche in the marketplace is identified and the innovative entrepreneur fills that niche by bringing a product to market. How is that happening in today’s marketplace? We got a brief glimpse of this phenomenon when the internet was new, but now the internet is dominated by the same, large corporations, making it increasingly difficult for new upstarts to get a foothold, no matter how inefficient those monopolies are at meeting consumer needs. Why? Because the nature of marketing is such on the internet that through tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO), domain hogging and brand identity, competition gets drowned out.
