> if the problem is indeed malware getting access to personal data, then the very obvious solution is to ensure that such personal data is not accessible by apps
Then you'd have the other "screaming minority" on HN show up, the "antitrust all the things" folks.
Your first link shows a graph that indicates more than 50% of Americans believe there is at least some competition, or a lot of competition; and that less than 1/3rd believe there is not enough, or no, competition in every sector of the economy that would be relevant to this discussion.
And that most Americans believe that bigger companies tend to have lower prices than smaller ones.
It’s not particularly clear then that there should be a lot of motivation to change things.
You're choosing the questions that have framing issues:
> more than 50% of Americans believe there is at least some competition, or a lot of competition in every sector of the economy that would be relevant to this discussion.
We're talking about Google and Apple but the relevant category would be "technology companies". Do phone platforms or mobile app distribution stores have "a lot of competition"? It's hard to see how anybody could think that. Do games and AI and web hosting? Sure they do. But they're lumping them all together.
They're also using "some competition" as the second-to-highest amount of competition even though that term could reasonably apply to a market where one company has 90% market share but not 100%, and it's confusingly similar to "not much competition". And they're somehow showing oil and gas as having less competition than telecommunications when oil and gas is a textbook fungible commodity and telecommunications is Comcast. That question has issues.
> And that most Americans believe that bigger companies tend to have lower prices than smaller ones.
This is the thing where Walmart has lower prices than the mom and pop. That doesn't imply that Walmart has better quality or service than a smaller company, and it doesn't imply that Walmart is operating in a consolidated market. Retail is objectively competitive in most areas.
Whereas when a big company is in a consolidated market, "big companies tend to have lower prices" doesn't hold and you get Google and Apple extracting 30%.
Moreover, the relevant part of that link was this part: More than two thirds of people, including the majority of both parties, support antitrust laws, six times as many people think they're not strict enough than think they're too strict and significantly more people agree with "the government should break up big tech" than disagree.
> On the other hand, maybe if the railways weren’t broken up the USA might have been crisscrossed with high speed rail by now.
Eh. The rails themselves are a natural monopoly in the same way roads are. It's one of the few things it makes sense to have the government build, or at least contract to have someone build, and then provide to everyone without restriction.
Meanwhile train cars and freight hauling and passenger service aren't any more of a natural monopoly than taxis or trucks. They get monopolized if someone is allowed to leverage a monopoly over the tracks into a monopoly over the rest of it, but that's unnecessary and undesirable. Separating them out allows the market that can be competitive to be competitive. Which is the same reason you don't want a tech monopoly leveraging it into control over ancillary markets that could otherwise be competitive.
There are two main reasons train service in the US is a shambles. The first is that the population density is too low, especially in the west. How many people do you expect to be riding a train from Boise to Des Moines on a regular basis? And the second is that truck drivers don't like freight rail, car companies don't like passenger rail and oil companies don't like either one, and they all lobby against anything that would make it better in the parts of the country where it could actually work. It's hard to make something good when there are millions of voters and billions of dollars trying to get it to suck.
Then you'd have the other "screaming minority" on HN show up, the "antitrust all the things" folks.