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Is this a good time to introduce the Coca-Cola death squads? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola#Colombian_death-squa...
No, but Google and Apple together could destroy a nation economically overnight without even lifting a finger, by bricking all devices within that nation and making their services (gmail, google maps, icloud) unavailable. No amount of guns or jails is equivalent to that power
They have access to such absurdly large amounts of money that they don't need those.
Why torture someone when you can make every aspect of their lives depend on your moat and then decide to kick them out?
Do you know how many people use Google, Apple or Meta for every single sign on for every app/website they use?
People are weapons.
Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people.
YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from.
Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know.
It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.
break into head office to find out
That's a reductio ad absurdum conclusion.
Both lobby for and are in major political cahoots with many governmental bodies worldwide. They lobby like crazy, and can defend just about any lawsuit that comes their way - including dodging congressional hearings, selectively adhering to laws other companies cannot afford to skip, etc.
But I think you knew that. Being argumentative with the general point OP was making doesn't solve anything and just defends multinationals when they shouldn't be defended.