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.