Google, Facebook, and Microsoft acquire services in ... a market! So, yes, that very much happens through "natural market forces", and you very much have a choi

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft acquire services in ... a market! So, yes, that very much happens through "natural market forces", and you very much have a choice in whether you use services that can be acquired/make any sense to acquire/where it makes any difference whether they get acquired or not. Just to give some examples: I use multiple public, non-profit IRC networks. The chance of those being acquired? Pretty close to zero. And even if, dropping one of them wouldn't really hurt much, and if everything else fails, even setting up my own would not be out of reach, keeping all the same user experience. Then, I use a usenet news server. If that one got acquired? Well, as long as the service stayed the same, it wouldn't really matter much, and if they started doing funny things in order to increase profits, it would be trivial to switch to a different provider that doesn't (which really should discourage anyone from even trying). Or how about my own email server? That will be damn difficult to acquire, I'd think. At most someone could acquire my ISP ... which, again, is highly fungible, if they started doing anything funny, I'd just obtain connectivity elsewhere. Yes, it very much is a "natural market force" that monopolies will form where you don't make the concious choice to use technology that is inherently monopoly unfriendly, and as such one could say that you "deserve" the monopoly if you use a service that can be acquired and where that has any real consequences.