> If you are participating in a free market, then you are subject to corporations.

No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.

But "corporation" is an extremely broad term. Mom and pop businesses are corporations. A friend and I own a corporation that makes games, just the two of us, no employees. But Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc. are also corporations. So "corporation" doesn't capture what's bad about the latter.

> The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that one must both allow corporations to rule over them, and never allow anyone to rule over the corporations.

No, that's not correct. The conclusion of libertarian ideals is that, first, corporations are not people--they don't have the same rights as people do. They are tools that people can use in a free market to more efficiently produce things and create wealth. But that's all they are. If we had that kind of free market, corporations that are larger than many countries probably wouldn't even exist.

Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market. The original concepts behind those corporations arose in what was more or less a free market--Larry and Sergey didn't need to get anyone's permission to put the original Google on the web, Jobs and Wozniak didn't need to get anyone's permission to build the first Apple computers. But at the scale those corporations are now, they cannot exist without the support and favoritism of governments. (And not just the US government; Apple, for example, would be dead in the water if it did not have the cooperation and support of the Chinese government for its manufacturing base.) And that means they are not products of "libertarian ideals". They might have started out that way, but they didn't, and couldn't, scale that way.

> Without copyright, what would change? First of all, we wouldn't have tech billionaires.

Sure we would. Zuckerberg isn't a billionaire because of copyright. He's a billionaire because he's convinced a substantial fraction of the entire planet that it's perfectly normal, routine, nothing to see here, to have an immensely valuable social networking tool appear by magic on the Internet for free. Same goes for the Google billionaires. Bezos isn't a billionaire because Amazon holds valuable copyrights; he's a billionaire because he sells something valuable, "what I want delivered to my door when I want it" convenience, and he's able to curry government favors so he can bully his supply chain into making that happen. Apple isn't sitting on a huge pile of cash because of copyrights; it's because they make devices that give a significant minority of the market what they want, no fuss, and governments let them manufacture those devices on the cheap while the market they're selling to is upscale.

Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in. But they'd do just as well, if not better, in a world without copyrights, as long as that world still had governments who would give them the favoritism they get now.

Everything that Meta owns is either copyright or hardware that facilitates the ownership of its distribution. They wouldn't have the interest or capital to run giant datacenters without the ability to profit from their "owned" users' data. Facebook and Instagram can only be valued because they are proprietary software: a category predicated on copyright. Even Meta's VR headsets are sold at a loss, with a walled garden app store designed to pay the difference.

> Of course those companies hold copyrights and patents, and defend them, because that's the legal environment they're operating in.

Yes, that's the thing I'm arguing against. Would you mind considering it for a moment?

> No, if you are participating in a free market, and a corporation is the most efficient way to provide what you want to buy, then you will end up buying it from the corporation.

That's how corporations immediately outcompete individuals. The argument that a corporation should not be treated as an individual is irrelevant, because that is its role in a marketplace. That's who individuals directly compete with!

> Second, corporations like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, etc., as they are now, are creatures of government favoritism, not a free market.

They are creatures in a market. Whether that market is free does not define them, only their opportunity. I agree that they get the opportunity of government favoritism, and that that is a significant part of the issue. My point is that it is not the root cause of the problem. In a "free market" that incorporates copyright and patents, any corporation who owns IP can leverage it as a moat, enforced by state violence. The fact that any individual can do the same does not change the power imbalance between an individual and a corporation: it increases it.

Each of the corporations you mentioned leverages a copyright moat as their core valuation. Even Amazon's anticompetitive behavior is predicated on their vertical integration of Amazon the delivery/fulfillment service with Amazon the marketplace. The fact that a marketplace can be owned at all is predicated on copyright.