Small companies require more overhead (per size) for compliance, yes, but they also have to compete with each other and they can't fight back nearly as effectively with lawyers and lobbyists.
> If you're a small company, that means you're not good enough
...at the game of monopoly, which is not a game any of us should be particularly invested in.
Though it's not the full Thiel monopolies are good philosophy. I merely think that large companies are not all monopolies, and that they can be monopsonies too, which can be good for consumers. (And they can also pay better and treat employees better than small companies because of the reasons I said above.)
> they can also pay better and treat employees better than small companies because of the reasons I said above
On the other side of every "easy dollar" is someone getting squeezed hard. Google employees and shareholders love the easy ad dollars, but everyone else pays through the nose for marketing. Apple employees and shareholders love the easy app store dollars, but independent devs and end customers get taken to the cleaners. Your ability to only see one side of this equation represents an extreme failure of imagination. We all pay a heavy price to keep things this way.
Large businesses are the ones that tend to abuse their power, gather data inappropriately, promote monopolies, squash competitors using underhanded tactics, make inappropriate financial deals, lie to investors, and rent-seek at a grand scale -- in other words, all the anti-patterns of badly regulated capitalism.
And mom-and-pop businesses are totally capable of bad behavior and especially are worse to their employees! If they're too small to have HR departments they are perfectly capable of doing business based on personal grudges, wage theft, and accidentally doing things up to and including hiring slave labor.
> lie to investors
This one's funny because startup investors actually demand you lie to them (because they think it shows the right personality traits for a CEO, psychotic optimism), whereas large companies are public and the SEC will sue you if you lie in your investor reports.