You like the price/performance improvements we've seen from Intel in the last couple of years thanks to competition from Ryzen? Thank the govt for that. If th

You like the price/performance improvements we've seen from Intel in the last couple of years thanks to competition from Ryzen? Thank the govt for that. If there weren't action taken, AMD would have died long ago due to a bunch of things like anti-competitive supplier agreements with PC makers, benchmark cooking, compiler 'enhancements' etc. (see the five years prior to Ryzen to get a small taste of what that future looked like) You like Google search and other Internet sites and services? Had the government not intervened, Microsoft would likely have continued down it's preferred path of using Windows and Internet Explorer as a choke point. This would have prevented companies like Google from ever getting traction to the point where they had the revenue to do anything remotely like what we've seen in the last 10 years. Microsoft would likely have found a way to box Amazon in and extract a fee from them on Windows (i.e. think what Apple does re: getting a cut of sales in its app store, only for all retail sales on Windows machines) and maybe they never would have gotten to a size/scale where they could have gone on to do things like AWS etc. There would have likely been 'problems' with the iPod that people wouldn't have experienced with the Zune, and forget about Microsoft ever letting something like BootCamp happen... Apple's fate would have likely been very different. (and without the success of the iPod it's unlikely that the iPhone/iPad ever would have happened or if they did Microsoft would have likewise found a way to contain it assuming they hadn't already killed/acquired Apple to get them out of the way.) There's a very good reason why you didn't see companies even remotely like FAANG succeeding in the 90's: Intel and Microsoft didn't allow the companies around then to thrive if they became a threat. You can say 'well, all these new companies are on the Web and that's how they succeeded.' The problem is, the Web requires a computer of some sort to connect to it. In the late 90's, Wintel controlled 95% of them or so. I suspect 10 years from now, the next generation will either be saying 'see, there was no need for government action... look at all the competitors those old FAANG companies we have today' or 'no one is able to compete with these FAANG companies... why won't the government do something?'