"the tool" meaning it was the first tool they reached for, not the only tool.
For example, if I said "Star Wars" was "the movie" to see in 1977, I obviously did not mean it was the only movie.
If I meant it was the only tool, I would have written "the only tool".
If you need to insert the words "only", "always", "never", "100%" into my words in order to argue, you should reconsider the strength of your argument.
Nah, I heard what you said and you said what you meant.
Even so, I'm happy to engage with your new argument: that regulatory capture is the first tool companies reach for to unfairly suppress competition. That's still wrong. Regulatory capture is slow, unwieldy, and opportunistic. The first tool a company reaches for is typically either M&A or dumping.
When WhatsApp was getting popular, did Facebook respond by crafting legislation with a plausibly deniable dual purpose, cultivating connections with campaign contributions and a held-open revolving door, wait for a wave of public sentiment that could carry their law up the priority list, through congress, and onto the books, and then sit back and pray that the resulting wind blowing at their backs and in WhatsApp's face would tip the balance enough to keep them on the throne? No, of course not! Facebook bought WhatsApp. Where there were two competitors, a free market exchange happened, and then there was one competitor. See also: banks. Yeah, they need FTC approval, but the free-er the M&A market, the easier it is for competitors to just merge together, and the more anti-competitive the result.
As for dumping, you'll often hear people blame legislation for the big ISP monopolies we have. Certainly there are no shortage of legislative failures in this space, yet it's not illegal to start an ISP. If you set out to create an ISP of your own, you'll probably be able to find a municipality willing to deal with you. The actual trouble will appear when you start selling your service. Your first few customers will gladly switch in order to take advantage of the better deal you're offering, but once the regional ISP monopoly notices the churn, suddenly you'll find that all of your prospective customers recently received a promotional discount from the monopoly and are no longer interested in your service. Then you go out of business, and customer rates go back up. It wasn't a law that kept you out of the market, it was the fact that your competitor had a larger war chest.
In both cases, more market freedom = less competition. Certainly, regulatory capture also exists and is also a problem, and in that case more market freedom = more competition. In some cases, it's even more complicated: economies of scale create genuine value by amortizing costs across volume, but they also create an anticompetitve moat. They have good aspects and bad aspects that are inextricably linked and inseparable from each other.
Still, focusing exclusively on regulatory capture will lead you to misdiagnose most markets. The cure will appear obvious, but where your diagnosis is incorrect, it won't work.
