However, in the Exponential Age, private companies increasingly encroach on these areas – ones that we once thought of as beyond the market’s reach. This is the result, once again, of increasing returns to scale. Exponential companies get bigger and bigger, sometimes verging on monopoly. They expand horizontally, at an accelerating rate, into ever-wider sectors of our society. And our democratic norms, embedded in slow-to-adapt institutions, seem unable to keep them in check.
