I'm found of "a democratically elected government is the least bad monopoly". If you must have a monopoly, it should be a government. But if you can avoid a monopoly, do that instead.

An important corollary to this is that monopolies should be isolated rather than integrated.

Suppose we say the municipal water system is a natural monopoly, so we're going to have the government do it.

Well, then the head of the municipal water system should be an elected position, so that if they're screwing it up, people can vote the bums out without having to remove a mayor or governor who might otherwise be doing a good job on some other issues and therefore be hard to remove.

That's the biggest problem with federal elections. Each party does a different set of terrible things and you can't vote against one set of failures without voting for the other one when everything is integrated.

Generally a government is the entity with a monopoly on force. That is why things like drug cartels or the mafia are so poisonous to the body politic.

That's the crux of the friction here. The old monopoly (gov) is being overrun by the new "monopoly" (tech). While it might not be a battle for the known universe, controlling the spice (i.e., attention, information, nudges, etc.) is definitely in play.

A government is a monopoly on violence, and it uses that monopoly to demand payment.