but not in the normal sense.
the monopoly drive is from two things: hypercompetition among the giants, and trying to destroy all competition that isn't a giant that can defend itself from the various forms of attack.
The CEOs and executives and boards may have their own motives, but that's irrelivant. A business is best modeled as something living, it's own thing, as fucked up as that is.
between regulation, management structures meant to stifle rank and file organization, the illusion of duty to shareholders above all (thanks Jack Welsh and friends), they're focused on survival and easing the effort it takes to survive.
It's why Google rushed out a half baked "AI" chatbot the week OpenAI revealed theirs. It's why Google and Microsoft and Facebook just buy out all the innovation.
It's why the trains are the way they are.
Because the way things work these days, since there's only a finite amount of human attention, if you lose an arms race you will be unable to catch up, until you have a tenth to a quarter of the budget the bigcorps have. for any field.
the goal is to either buy out or outspend the competition if they have less than you.
if they're on equal footing, you have a press war, or try to scoop them on product releases. put your funds towards mindshare instead of excellence. After all, you don't need good products anymore. You just need to have the only products anyone knows about.
Nintendo works the same way, just against its own products. A back catalog isn't one they're making money off of, after all.
