They had successfully captured and neutered the single force that was supposed to keep them in check, and spent the next decade consolidating their power by merging the entire economy into a handful of gigacorps that were no longer competing with each other, simply colluding to keep the grift going for as long as possible. They stopped bothering with the idea of innovation or creating new products, and simply bought out / legally crippled any competitor to their wealth. It's impossibly convoluted and expensive to create any kind of online platform now, due to regulations that put the blame on user-generated content on the platform owners. It doesn't matter when you're a gigacorp, but for any would-be competitor to Facebook or Google, that is now a gigantic hurdle that is all but impossible to overcome. A legal hurdle that not a single gigacorp had to deal with when they were starting out, which is just one of the many ways they have created legal moats around their positions of power due to their complete control of government.