More than a decade ago, over the July 4th holiday, I declared my personal Independence Day and attempted to sever ties with Microsoft, then a pervasive and abusive technology monopoly.
I failed.
Several of Microsoft’s products were just so much better than the independent alternatives, so I gave up my personal Microsoft protest. And gradually, as US and European antitrust authorities helped give new companies a leg up on Bill Gates’s power, I became more willing to use Xbox, Microsoft Word, even Bing.
In the meantime, other centralized giants have grown to early-Microsoft levels of power and beyond. Facebook is turning us into guinea pigs.
