Regulate before it's too late

Rather than rely on market forces, we might all be better off letting companies grow so big that governments are forced to step in

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There's a line in our interview with Cory Doctorow this month (see p44) that's been bugging me since I read it. “I think that, as a consumer, there's not much you can do,” he said of the notion of voting with your feet, of leaving the services that hook you in, hike prices and make the service worse. The implication being you do more harm to yourself by ditching Amazon or Facebook than the company you're leaving.

It's been bugging me, because he's got a point and one I've felt myself. A couple of years ago, I got sick of the constant price rises for the Amazon Ring doorbell subscription. I voted with my feet by dumping Ring for the subscription-free Tapo doorbell, but I stopped short of cancelling my Amazon Prime subscription and telling Jeff Bezos to shove it up his Blue Origin because Amazon was too valuable to me. I'd have done myself more harm by cutting off the endless deliveries, the Kindle books, the occasional football match on Amazon Prime, because it would be more difficult or costly to get them elsewhere.