> Don’t all companies have a power imbalance of some kind with their users? Some amount of power imbalance is okay. Obviously not every entity can have the exa

> Don’t all companies have a power imbalance of some kind with their users? Some amount of power imbalance is okay. Obviously not every entity can have the exact same amount of power nor would this be desirable. What matters is the scale of the difference. A single entity having several orders of magnitude more power than the average entity. Let's call this a "giant", for ease of reference. All entities optimize toward the execution of their own agenda (this shouldn't be controversial). This is in essence a good thing since it drives competition, refinement and development. The trouble starts when giants appear. The giants are few and the non-giants are many. It is unlikely that the giants' agendas will forever be aligned well with the agendas of the non-giants. Yet, due to their sheer size, the giants have the ability not only to compete and cooperate with the non-giants, but to change and warp the very rules of the game to something that doesn't resemble the rules we started out with. In this sense, scale truly makes all the difference. I think a physics analogy is apt here. Think of a bunch of marbles of roughly comparable masses bouncing around each other. They need not all have exactly the same mass for the overall dynamics of the setting to be retained. They will also have different individual momenta which will change constantly as time progresses. Now introduce a large stone sphere weighing over a ton into the picture. Can we reasonably say this new system has similar dynamics to the old one? After all, it's just one more marble. Yet now for the first time we have a marble that is practically immoveable but can move any other, which is a strictly new dynamic.