Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is HN, the Church of the Free Market is well represented. If you haven't yet seen someone give the "free markets create competition" speech on Monday and the "my company aims to capture this space and then entrench a monopoly with economies of scale / network effects / platform effects / two sided markets / last mile dynamics" pitch on Tuesday, just hang around HN a bit more. You won't have to wait long.
I had thought the clear need for anti-trust had tickled down to the plebs on here. Unfortunate to see that people still casually refer to free markets as if it's a meaningful concept. If you really truly think that regulation is dragging down some market, it's easy to talk about in specific terms. It is only possible to employ "free markets" in bad faith.
Beneath them, people tend to get good at programming before they get good at spotting exploitation, so there is always a stratum of True Believers to feed the operation. Individually they wise up and graduate, but the stratum remains as it is fed from the bottom by the proverbial sucker born every minute.
Then we have the top of the pyramid which actually does benefit from it all. They are small in number but they have enough money to fund the whole space (more importantly: enough money to have a reason to fund the whole space) so they have outsize influence. They could decide to ban me for saying this, for example.