It seems like free trade is beneficial when you're at the top or among relative equals. The educated people you are talking about are presumably American and/o

It seems like free trade is beneficial when you're at the top or among relative equals. The educated people you are talking about are presumably American and/or European, so they benefit from free trade. However, countries that are behind in an area would benefit from protectionism in that area, otherwise the companies strong in that area will come in and take the market. This makes local competition much harder. Imagine a local African grocery store trying to compete with Walmart; there is no way they can match Walmart's worldwide distribution system. I think this is probably one of the reasons why there is no European equivalent of Facebook: it's not easy to compete with Facebook. By the time it was clear that Facebook was something useful, it had already ironed out any scalability and usability problems in the US college market. So unless a European competitor had started around when Facebook did, they would be behind both technically and in the fact that any American friends were already on Facebook. The only Facebook competitors that I am aware of are in protectinistic countries: Russia (VK) and China (Renren and WeChat Moments). (I don't know if Mastadon is European, but I don't see it as an actual competitor, at least at the moment.)