We should have the ability to run any code we want on hardware we own

And that is what is wrong here. Even the smallest nation should be far more powerful than the largest corporation. But corporations are now more powerful than most nations, including some really big ones. So the only way to solve this is to for an umbrella for nations that offsets the power that these corporations have.

The first thing you notice when you arrive at Brussels airport is the absolute barrage of Google advertising that tries to convince you that Google is doing everything they can to play by the rules. When it is of course doing the exact opposite. So at least Google seems to realize that smaller nations banding together wield power. But they will never wield it as effectively as a company can, so we still have many problems.

Since nations can be really small, I don't agree.

I think it's shocking how many people Google can affect through its search algorithms (more than any nation on Earth) and yet there is no democratic system to hold them accountable.

Company aims for profit.

Bigger scale allows for better efficiency.

So companies naturally grow big. The bigger they are, the easier for them to compete.

Big companies have access to tremendous resources, so they can push laws by bribing law makers, advertising their agenda to the masses.

There's no way around it, not without dismantling capitalism. Nations will serve to the corporations, no other way around.

There are natural boundaries of the growth scale, which are related to the inherent efficiency of communications between people and overall human capability. Corporations are controlled by people and people have limited brains and mouths. I feel that with AI development, those boundaries will move apart and allow for even greater growth eventually.

A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again, which they can afford to do because it's such a small market. Exercising arbitrary power is not the trump card you think it is. Hell, even a tiny nation with reasonable but annoying (from the point of view of a corporation) laws may not be worth it to deal with.

Yes there is, the population passing laws to regulate this. The problem is though, that most people don't understand and don't care enough until its too late.

Point being, also states can do murder.

This is dogma, not proven fact, and most people that argue this tend to use self-serving metrics and a tailored definition of "efficient". Some counterexamples: early Google was much more efficient in responding to market changes than the current top-heavy organization; small hospitals tend to have better health outcomes (both per patient and per dollar) than large chains. Tesla was able to innovate much faster than established behemoths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Omar_Assad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Sayfollah_Musallet

There are good examples, though—you can produce a single gold ring a lot cheaper than you can produce a one-of-a-trillion of them, cuz at some point you simply run out of gold. Another example is running into a cap in demand. Classic sigmoid vs exponential patterns.

> A nation that did that would be able to do that exactly once before everyone decides to never do business with it ever again

US CBP and ICE would like a word with you.

True "some small state fallacy" please. And here I believe it matters if we are talking about some small state, or a small state that happens to be a close ally with lots of influence for various reasons.