As Megan McArdle already laid out in the Washington Post, the Musk Twitter thing has sent everyone’s political sensors spinning around.

In the last 5 years, conservatives have had to reckon with the reality that having a handful of monopolies control the internet is a really bad idea. And that there has to be some limit to the kind of power corporations can wield over the economy and public discourse. During that same time the Left decided to embrace the idea of unlimited corporate control over our lives.

As long as it favored them.

In Disney Dems Think Corporations Should Be Our Governments, I wrote that, “Democrats, after spending the last decade sneering that Republicans believe “corporations are people”, have found a new group of oppressed victims to shelter, protect, and fight for. Corporations. Forget corporations being people, Democrats want them to be governments.”

Now that Elon Musk bought Twitter, they’re suddenly realizing the fallacy of, “Build Your Own Social Media Network”.

“Musk and his apologists say if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere. But where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach millions of people other than Twitter?” Robert Reich tweeted.

The former Clintonworld figure turned social justice troll has always been a cartoon of ideological ineptitude, but this one is still monumental.

Twitter has always been a particularly bad example. It’s fairly small and not very profitable, and largely valued as a continuous feed and a place for elite discourse.

The real Big Tech giant monopolies, e.g. Google, Amazon, Facebook, would be immune to those same kinds of tactics. They’re too massively inflated in price and power.

People could and did build their own various Twitters catering to various demographics, e.g. TruthSocial (Trump supporters), Gettr (MAGA), Gab (Nazis) and Mastodon (Geeks) , but that’s very different than replicating the massive grip over the ecosystem wielded by a Google or an Amazon, or even Facebook’s near total dominance of social media.