> I think competition is completely overrated

Competition is the only thing standing in the way of serfdom. Choice is the only thing that allows you to say no to anything because you can get what you need somewhere else. Without it your only option is to say yes to anything no matter how little you want it.

> there's actual research that digital customers are even stickier than physical ones and less likely to shop for alternatives (just ask your aunt how often she goes shopping for web browsers).

Even when this is true, it doesn't mean that competition isn't working. When switching costs are low and people don't switch anyway, it means that it's working well -- in an efficient market all the producers are required to make their products equally good to avoid losing business to the others. Sticking with what you have because the ability to easily switch caused the producer to make it just as good as the alternatives is a very different thing than sticking with what you have even though it's terrible because switching costs are high.

You use browsers as an example, but remember that when Internet Explorer was stagnating, your aunt and half the world switched to Firefox.

Moreover, this is still also a reflection of their anti-competitive behavior rather than actual consumer choice. If when you bought a phone it came with a "web" icon and the first time you click on it, it listed all the popular browsers and had you choose one, that would be a whole different landscape than the one we have where your phone comes with one chosen for you and then suspiciously a disproportionate number of iOS users use Safari and a disproportionate number of Android users use Chrome. If switching costs were actually low, the browser share on each platform should be about the same.

> Android actually allows different stores without too much hassle and everyone is still on Google Play.

This is to some extent the same thing -- Google Play is less abusive than Apple because the competitive pressure keeps them in check more.

But even there, the amount of hassle of installing another store is too much -- if you try to install anything but the default, you not only get scary warnings, the other stores can't actually update the apps they install. And Google privileges themselves immensely by being installed as the default.

> The problem with competition is that competition requires choice and choice comes with cost, and people don't like having to make decisions every five minutes

That's not the problem with competition, it's the mechanism that incumbents use to destroy it.

"People don't want choices" is only true when there are many choices but all the choices are roughly equivalent, so that the gain from a better choice is smaller than the cost of taking the time to evaluate the alternatives. It's only true when the efficient market hypothesis is true. But the efficient market hypothesis requires people to be evaluating their alternatives, or it won't be true.

So if you give everyone a reasonable choice by default, at a time when competition exists, they take it. Because that option is about as good as the others and it saves them time. But when you give the same default to everyone, that destroys competition -- tomorrow none of the other alternatives will exist, because they can't survive just by being as good as the competition when something else is the default. And without them there is nothing left to prevent the default choice from becoming a stagnant and abusive monopoly.

> Point being you're ending up with Amazon/Walmart/Megacorp XY anyway because that's just how advanced economies roll, they tend towards more concentration

They tend towards more concentration because of the unconscionable lack of antitrust enforcement. This isn't a feature of "advanced economies" -- it's just Standard Oil and US Steel all over again.

> I absolutely won't be surprised if the retail sector is going to consolidate next and small retail just gets wiped out by tech, covid has given us a taste of that already.

"Small retail" has been getting wiped out by Walmart and Home Depot for decades. Economies of scale exist. But Walmart doesn't have an anti-competitive moat, it only has low prices. And it still has to compete with Amazon, Target, Costco, CVS, Best Buy, Dollar General, etc. None of which is "small retail" but that doesn't mean any of them is going without effective competition.

> It's either regulated behemoths or unregulated ones, the 90s internet isn't coming back.

Smash the behemoths into non-vertically-integrated pieces and watch the 90s internet come back.