> Users don't have much power, individually.

Users have a lot of power individually. The most obvious example is when there is competition. You could be a single person and your counterparty could be the world's largest corporation, but if you have ten other viable alternatives, they can do no worse to you than the best of your other alternatives or you just choose the other one.

But you can also do it by being stubborn. Some people seem to have completely forgotten how to do this. There is a transaction with a surplus of $100, the counterparty is some egregious monopolist and the deal they offer you is that they get $99 and you get $1. A lot of people take the deal, because $1 is better than nothing, but that's not it. What you do is flip over the table and walk away, because that costs you $1 but it costs them $99 (or $50 or whatever their share would be after offering whatever it would have taken to satisfy your sense of fairness).

People are so lazy now, or they've been conditioned, so now they always just take the $1 even if the alternative is only a minor inconvenience for them. Okay, you have to use Signal instead of WhatsApp, so what? But being willing to walk away from an unfair offer can sometimes be to your advantage even in an individual negotiation, because you both know the other party has more to lose. It's definitely to your advantage when other similarly-situated people do the same thing at scale. See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

> They express their power collectively through the political system.

They express their power collectively however they want. Organizations (e.g. FSF, EFF) can do things like pool money to create competing systems. Even for-profit corporations can do this -- you don't like the incumbent? Start a competitor, and raise funding from all the other people who don't like the incumbent.

But again this seems like something people have been conditioned to believe doesn't work, even though it obviously does. To take a simple example, the EFF created Let's Encrypt, which cut the legs out from under the certificate mafia and made TLS free for everybody. All it took was an organization to pool enough resources to develop the initial implementation.

> I'm just very skeptical of the approach taken by Europe with the DMA. It seems to be less about empowering individual users and more about letting other large players carve up the Apple/Google 2-slice pie into a few more big slices.

Government regulations often fail as a result of incompetent administration or some corruption. But some forms of anti-trust can only be fixed through the law because the trusts themselves were created that way.

If government enforce contracts in restraint of trade then people will enter into contracts and form a cartel or enforce a monopoly. That is not acceptable, so then governments have to constrain what kinds of contracts they're willing to enforce, and somebody has to write down what "restraint of trade" means to establish how that works. It's not fun and they'll often get it wrong but the only alternatives are to either not have governments enforce contracts or allow cartels to form that become de facto private governments. So we do the best we can.

The EU is not great at this, but the problem they're trying to address is real, so sometimes you just get to sit back and watch two entities you don't really like have a fight with each other.