Major AI/platform firms are not just monopolists within markets but are creating closed, planned commercial ecosystems — 'cloud fiefdoms' — that match supply and demand inside platform boundaries rather than via decentralized price signals. This transforms competition into platform governance, shifting economic coordination from open markets to vertically controlled stacks.
— If true, policy must shift from standard antitrust tinkering to confronting quasi‑state commercial planning: data portability, interop, platform neutrality, and new forms of democratic oversight become central.
Yanis Varoufakis
2026.01.03
78% relevant
The article’s ‘technofeudal ruling class’ language maps directly to the existing idea that hyperscalers and cloud owners act as de facto fiefdoms—extracting rents via proprietary compute and platform control—thereby substituting concentrated platform power for functioning competitive markets.
Yanis Varoufakis
2025.12.04
100% relevant
Yanis Varoufakis’ article names the 'Magnificent Seven' and Palantir and explicitly likens their scale and matching power to Gosplan’s planning, claiming they 'kill the market itself' by replacing price‑based coordination.
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