That's just vanilla regulation. Yes it tends to create market inefficiencies, by definition. Capture entails industry corrupting and directing regulatory bodies.
I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.
This straw man doesn't merit falsification. Nobody claims wealth alone gives political power. Wealth applies leverage to all endeavors, but political ends still require strategy and operationalization. It's just a lot easier with a couple trillion dollars, vs. a single individual vote once every couple of years.
> you start or fund a think tank that writes policy proposals, or a media organization that advocates your views
Or you run "money primaries", financially filtering the menu of candidates before democratic voting. Or you pay/lobby for (non-democratic) judicial appointments, which is a strategy that's been openly pursued since 1971: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/powell-memo.pdf
Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?
edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.
A family member lost years of irreplaceable photos and paid apps due to account lock, and doing this across two countries they were legitimately residing in triggered it.
This is a sad take, and a misunderstanding of what art is. Tech and tools go "obsolete". Literature poses questions to humans, and the value of art remains to be experienced by future readers, whatever branch of the tech tree we happen to occupy. I don't begrudge Clarke or Vonnegut or Asimov their dated sci-fi premises, because prediction isn't the point.
The role of speculative fiction isn't to accurately predict what future tech will be, or become obsolete.
The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.
I'm not sure what definition of capitalism you're running with, but as early as Adam Smith, the importance of competition free from monopoly and rent seeking was central to the mainstream definition.
Using power to tilt the playing field is the logical outcome of all political systems, not just capitalism.
> capture the market, and become the sole dominant force in that market and use your position to then pull up the ladder behind you and cement your position
This is worth discussing in detail. Becoming dominant by providing a better thing, or investing more capital, is not tilting the playing field, it's winning the game. Getting government protected monopolies, special tax write-offs, subsidies, exclusive grants is. Uber and Facebook are not anticompetitive just because they are dominant, they are anticompetitive to the extent that they specifically use their dominance to influence politics.
> Survival of the fittest and efficient marketplace
Rent seeking is an Econ 101 example of market inefficiency.
> what's the other option, rent seeking is socialism?
Rent seeking is rent seeking. It is a form of corruption, via regulatory capture. It is a way in which any political system can fail, not limited to an ideology like "socialism" or "capitalism".
This is misuse of language. Rent seeking is anti-competitive by definition. The current system, as far as it encourages and rewards rent seeking, is anti-capitalist.