If capitalism is supposed to reward free competition, why do companies strive to build structural moats via lock-in (Nvidia’s CUDA), social coercion (Apple’s green bubbles), data enclosure (Meta’s closed social graph), or regulatory capture (Uber’s Prop 22 model)? What do these strategies reveal about how competition actually works in tech markets? And how do these moats affect regular people?

When tech firms stockpile proprietary datasets or ignore copyright / anti scraping practices, does that function as immediate productive input or as a reserve of future market power? In what sense does data hoarding resemble money hoarding? There are many ongoing experiments on how to deal with this like anti-scraper software or scraping for a fee. Which model do you think is best for different types of data producers?

How should we interpret simultaneous record profits and mass layoffs across tech since 2022, including firms that cite AI as the rationale? Is this a temporary correction, a strategy of labor discipline, or a structural shift in how surplus is extracted?