Despite the rhetoric of competition and markets, the ultimate aim of the tech evangelists is often to create monopolies which are the quickest ways to profit.
Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America, was quoted by the Associated Press: "There is a real disconnection between the rhetoric of competition and the consumer reality in the cable marketplace.
For anyone who cares about the future of American politics, the comment represents a dwindling commitment to politics itself, to the notion that, through rhetoric and competition, we might find a common way as a people.
And in the House, rhetoric about competition was equally strong.
It seems President Obama concluded that we as Americans can only understand the rhetoric of competition (and the related rhetoric of consumption).
The rhetoric of improving competition cannot lie at the heart of economic populism in the 21st century.
But the rhetoric of perfect competition, sovereign consumer, free markets and the dangers of government regulation remains locked in the era of Hayek, if not of Smith.
Shazad Amin, CEO of MEND, a thinktank which seeks wider Muslim voter engagement, said it was "a disgraceful spectacle to see Goldsmith's campaign resort to incendiary and divisive rhetoric in this mayoral competition".
The Clinton plan, they say, borrowed their rhetoric of market-based competition, but it added elements such as caps on insurance premiums, the alliances (which they consider too large and regulatory), and certain tax provisions (which, they argue, encourage neither employers nor employees to be sensitive to health-care costs).
That, of course, doesn't mean that successful capitalists like Thiel would be supporting Corbyn in his plan to recreate the state monopolies of yore or submit schools once more to local education control, but it does mean the rhetoric of choice and competition is at least being challenged and not only from the political left.
