Globalopoly: How the World Became One Giant Board Game—and You’re Still Losing
They say the world is flat, but anyone who has tried to buy a train ticket in India, a SIM card in Nigeria, or a decent bagel outside New York quickly learns the planet is actually shaped like a single, gargantuan Monopoly board—complete with the same four railroads, the same two utilities, and the same family of four that always ends up owning everything while everyone else lands on Park Lane with a hotel already built. From Brussels to Brasília, monopoly isn’t just a rainy-Sunday board game; it is the unofficial operating system of global capitalism, now running on firmware so buggy that even the technocrats occasionally reboot in despair.
Consider the European Union, where competition law is supposedly stricter than a German tax inspector’s handshake. Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s trust-busting czarina, has spent years swatting Silicon Valley giants with fines the size of small island GDPs. Yet, whenever Brussels forces Apple to offer a second app store, Cupertino simply adds another zero to the legal slush fund and keeps scrolling. The fine becomes a line item, the market remains cornered, and the consumer—dazzled by a slightly different shade of emoji—congratulates herself on having “choice.” Somewhere in Seattle, Jeff Bezos is laughing so hard his rocket wobbles off course.
Swing east to China, where the monopoly game has been Sinicized with characteristic efficiency. Ant Group, Tencent, and their ilk sit on every square like gleaming red hotels, while the Communist Party plays both banker and occasional angry parent flipping the table. Last year’s regulatory crackdown vaporized $1.1 trillion in market cap faster than you can say “common prosperity,” which proves that even monopolies have to pay rent—just not in colorful paper money. Instead, they remit loyalty in the form of data, censorship, and the occasional disappearing CEO. The Party gets its cut, the firms get a slightly shorter leash, and 1.4 billion smartphone users keep tapping, riding, and streaming on platforms no foreign competitor is allowed to enter. Call it protectionism with Chinese characteristics, or simply the largest gated community on Earth.
Meanwhile, in the Global South, monopoly wears a developmental mask. India’s Ambani family controls both the fiber-optic cables and the streaming soap operas that travel through them. In Brazil, three families own most of the supermarkets, the beer, and the banks; the national pastime isn’t football so much as wondering which surname will buy the other two before halftime. Across Africa, telecom towers rise like metallic baobabs, each one branded by either MTN, Airtel, or Orange—corporate tricolors staking digital sovereignty one prepaid voucher at a time. The irony is exquisite: countries fought empires for independence only to gift the commanding heights to a handful of shareholders whose headquarters are one tax treaty away.
And then there is the newest board square: data. Not content with railroads and utilities, today’s monopolists have privatized the very act of existing online. Google knows you’re pregnant before your mother does; Facebook can nudge an election by tweaking what your uncle shares at 2 a.m.; Amazon’s Alexa is basically a Victorian governess who reports back to the manor house. The twist? We, the global peasantry, installed the governess ourselves—because ordering toilet paper by voice felt futuristic. If that isn’t late-stage capitalism’s idea of a community chest card, I don’t know what is.
Of course, regulators keep promising to break up the board, redistribute the deeds, and maybe even toss in a few extra dice so newcomers can play. But every antitrust ruling seems to arrive with the urgency of a UN climate summit communiqué: applauded in the plenary, ignored in the lobby bar. The monopolists have already moved on to the metaverse, where land is virtual, rent is programmable, and the only sure thing is that the same four aviators will own the augmented Boardwalk before the rest of us finish downloading the patch.
In the end, global monopoly is less a market failure than a mirror: it reflects our collective willingness to trade convenience for captivity, novelty for serfdom. Until that appetite changes, the banker will keep grinning, the dice will keep rolling, and the rest of us will keep circling the board, hoping the next turn lands us on Free Parking—even though we all know that house rule was never in the official instructions.
