It is the state that recognizes Amazon and Elastic in the first place, though. Without the state's involvement, a developer at Elastic could choose to continue releasing their work product to the world under an open-source license - and a developer at AWS could choose to release the secret sauce that makes AWS's Elasticsearch such a threat to Elastic.
We're having this whole conversation about whether big companies might subvert and coerce the state without recognizing that they already do coerce it by making the state recognize their very existence. They would have no power without that (what is a lobbyist without anything to lobby on behalf of?), but they've been so successful at hawking their narrative that all of us think it's perfectly normal and inevitable that they exist.
Take that red-and-black pill (either because it's half-doomer or because it's ancom, either way) and chew on it.
We're having this whole conversation about whether big companies might subvert and coerce the state without recognizing that they already do coerce it by making the state recognize their very existence. They would have no power without that (what is a lobbyist without anything to lobby on behalf of?), but they've been so successful at hawking their narrative that all of us think it's perfectly normal and inevitable that they exist.
Take that red-and-black pill (either because it's half-doomer or because it's ancom, either way) and chew on it.