> Of course, it doesn't immediately follow from either physical property or intellectual property that it will be abused in the way Doctorow describes (by "keeping customers by making it impossible for them to leave"), but it certainly could be. For example, suppose a relatively small number of individuals or companies owned most of the land, and most of the industrial machinery, and all the investment capital - then everyone else would have to go work for them, and produce whatever the property owners wanted to produce, instead of what they wanted to make for themselves. Someone might describe such a dynamic as fundamentally abusive in exactly the same way that intellectual property is.

I completely agree it can be extended in that way and it has been done so in the past; There are even countries that have political parties that generally agree with such a statement and work towards (albeit imperfectly) to limit or abolish such monopolies of capital.

(The US on the other hand left their anti-trust laws to rust on the side and let monopolistic entities gain power such as Amazon and Facebook; here is a report on how Amazon has been using sale and review data to launch AmazonBasics products undercutting other brands: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-competition-shopify-wayf... on the "Amazon's Version" section)