Standard Oil captured predominate market share over fossil precursors: Black Gold. Texas Tea. This did promote a stranglehold over home, commercial and industrial energy provisioning, as well as the revolution in fossil related chemistry. This affected transportation as urbanization and suburbanization outpaced horses. It affected building heat in the winter. Farming. Fertilizers. It overlapped rail and sea transport, as diesel replaced coal/wood combustibles.
Healthcare and medicine is one of those industrial segments, too, as we witness further consolidation among hospital networks and consumer pharmacies. Electricity generation and transmission is one. Arguably telecomms, too. Some segments are granted so-called regulated monopolies, because some infrastructure is just too expensive to develop without granting a profitable, protected, monopoly. These are monopoly with critical health and welfare dependencies.
Ya know what's not a critical dependency for genuine human health and welfare? Half-baked "Smart" gadgets and so-called social media (which is actually more sociopathic). The bullet point use cases cited are sour-grape bu****it from companies squabbling over easy money they missed out on by entering markets late, entering early, or copying tech, without being able to truly advance.
If smart phone apps, social media, instant messaging and mobile gaming simply vanished from the face of the Earth overnight... we would then know who to launch into space on the B Ark. Should be easy to convince the whiners that the world is about to be destroyed by an enormous mutant star goat.
