How We Traded Democratic Rules for Corporate Permissions

Regulation is the landscape, not the weather. Whether you’re building an app, writing a newsletter, selling crafts online, or just trying to share your work with the world, you will encounter rules that shape what’s possible. If democratic institutions don’t write them, the market’s largest players will. The question isn’t whether we’ll have rules—it’s who writes them, and whether they serve the many or the few.

The Terrain We All Navigate

Every creative project, every small business, every attempt to build something new encounters the same friction: someone else’s checklist. Clinical trials, security certifications, app store reviews, content guidelines, payment processor requirements. Large corporations spread these costs across global operations. For everyone else, they’re quicksand.

We’ve been told this is the price of safety and quality. But whose safety? And quality for whom?

When Public Rules Become Corporate Moats

Take drug development. FDA protocols stretch 10-15 years and cost billions. We get safer medicines, yes—but we also get a market where only a dozen companies can play. The same pattern repeats everywhere:

  • Banking regulations meant to prevent fraud now require millions in compliance, ensuring only existing banks can afford to be banks
  • Content moderation rules written to protect users become weapons to silence competition
  • Data protection laws designed for privacy create paperwork mountains only tech giants can climb

Each rule began as protection. Each evolved into a wall. Between the garage startup and the established enterprise lies a killing field where dreams die of paperwork.

Why This Happens: The Representation Gap

The companies that dominate your daily life didn’t just adapt to thick regulations—they helped write them. While the U.S. population has tripled since 1913, the House of Representatives remains frozen at 435 seats. Each representative now speaks for nearly 800,000 people.

When democratic representation thins, money fills the vacuum. Lobbyists craft rules that match their clients’ capabilities while crushing potential competitors. The cycle feeds itself: complex rules favor the large, the large grow larger, and their influence grows with them.

The New Feudalism: Platform Permissions Replace Public Rights

When government rules become too complex or costly, private corporations step in with their own. But these aren’t regulations—they’re permissions. And permissions can be revoked.

If you develop apps, Apple and Google decide if your work can exist. They take 15-30% of your revenue, change the rules without warning, and can destroy your business overnight.

If you create content, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram determine what can be said, who sees it, and whether you get paid. The “community guidelines” you follow weren’t written by any community you belong to.

If you sell online, Amazon’s algorithms decide your visibility. Payment processors like PayPal can freeze your money for months. Violate terms you’ve never read, and you’re exiled from commerce itself.

If you work at these companies, you enforce rules you didn’t write, for reasons you may not believe in, because that’s the job. You become an unwitting agent of a system that concentrates power in ever fewer hands.

This isn’t free market capitalism. It’s digital feudalism, where platform lords grant and revoke permissions to participate in economic life.

What We Lost: The Internet’s Original Promise

Remember when the Internet felt open? That wasn’t an accident. The network’s creators deliberately kept the rules thin: here’s how computers address each other, here’s how data packets move, everything else is up to you. No permission needed. No gatekeepers. No 30% tax.

That simplicity unleashed the greatest explosion of creativity in human history. Blogs, wikis, forums, early YouTube, countless small businesses—all flourished because the only rule was “follow the protocol.”

Now imagine if sending data required paying AT&T 30% of your revenue. That’s the reality we’ve accepted for mobile apps. We traded the Internet’s promise for the convenience of walled gardens.

The Pattern, Everywhere You Look

Hotels once used public star ratings. Simple, transparent, universal. Chains responded by creating proprietary tiers—Ritz-Carlton, Westin, Courtyard—that overshadow public standards. Where public measurement weakens, private substitutes dominate.

Office documents belonged to no one. Then Microsoft leveraged Windows to make Word and Excel the default. For decades, sharing meant surrendering to their formats, their pricing, their control.

Payment processing was a utility. Now Stripe and PayPal are judge and jury, freezing accounts and demanding documentation that rivals what banks require. They’re not regulated like banks—they’re something more powerful.

Social connection was protocol-based (email, blogs, RSS). Now it’s permission-based (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). You don’t own your contacts, your content, or your reach. You rent them, and the rent always goes up.

This is the pattern: where public infrastructure retreats, private tollbooths advance.

The True Cost (For All of Us)

When a small business pays platform fees, that’s money not spent on wages. When creators self-censor to please algorithms, culture grows more uniform. When developers abandon ideas because app store policies make them impossible, innovation dies quietly.

But the deepest cost is to democracy itself. When a handful of companies write the rules for billions, when they decide what can be built, sold, or said, when they extract tribute from every transaction—that’s not a market economy. It’s a command economy with better PR.

A Different Path: Rules Like Protocols

We don’t need to eliminate rules. We need better ones. Rules that work like the Internet’s protocols:

  • Thin: Define outcomes, not methods
  • Open: Anyone can participate without permission
  • Transparent: The rules are public and their evolution is democratic
  • Proportional: Compliance scales with size and impact

Imagine if e-commerce regulation simply required “deliver as promised or refund automatically.” No prescribed methods, no paperwork mountains, just an outcome everyone understands. Small sellers could comply as easily as Amazon.

What Changes When We See the System

If you work at a platform company, you’re not the villain. You’re operating within incentives the system created. But you have power: to question policies internally, to advocate for openness, to build features that empower rather than extract.

If you create, sell, or build online, you’re not alone. Every frustration you feel—every rejected app, every frozen payment, every algorithmic burial—is shared by millions. That shared experience is the foundation for collective action.

If you’re “just a user,” you’re the reason these platforms have power. Your attention, your data, your dollars—these are the resources they extract and monetize. You have more leverage than you think.

The Choice Before Us

Regulation is inevitable - I am not talking about government regulation here. The question is whether we’ll have democratic rules that enable participation or corporate permissions that extract rent. Whether we’ll have digital public squares or private shopping malls. Whether the next generation will inherit an open Internet or a closed permission system.

The path forward isn’t through destroying platforms or abandoning technology. It’s through remembering that we once built systems that trusted people to participate without permission. We can build them again.

But first, we have to see the walls for what they are. Not protection, but capture. Not safety, but control. Not innovation, but extraction.

The Internet proved that thin, open protocols unleash human creativity. Every walled garden proves the opposite. The choice is ours: accept a world where participation requires permission, or build one where opportunity remains open to all.

Change begins with recognition. Share this if you see the walls too.