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I will give you a couple of markets that are not only competitive, but they also have very little governmental oversight.The first one is the integrated circuit. First and foremost, governments have not figured out a way to tax transistors. That means there is little governmental oversight to these businesses. Next, integrated circuits are small. A briefcase can hold hundreds or thousands of them. A single shipping container can hold millions. That means it is straightforward and inexpensive to ship integrated circuits anywhere around the world.Next, unless you are going for the highest-end integrated circuits, IC devices are relatively easy to make. A small fabrication house can crank out millions of small to medium ICs a year. Once you have the fabrication systems, clean rooms, and assembly areas, integrated circuits cost pennies to make. Even high-end systems-on-a-chip only cost a dollar or two in silicon and substrates. That means the value of your integrated circuit is the intellectual property used to create it and not the chip itself.Intellectual property is easy to move around. With the internet, you can design the chip in one country, make it in another, and sell it in a dozen other countries. Finally, the value of a system created with integrated circuits can be quite high. I worked on one system that we made with $100 in parts, and we sold it for over $10,000. We could do that because the customers were using those parts to generate millions of dollars of revenue each year and needed our parts.When we put all of this together, what we see is that the cost of entry for making integrated circuits can be quite low. Many companies specialize in designing integrated circuits but do not do the fabrication themselves. Instead, they pay other companies to make the chips and then sell the chips around the world. The cost to enter this kind of market is a few thousand dollars for the various design and test tools, and you are up and running.The result is there are hundreds or even thousands of companies that design integrated circuits around the world. Since there are millions of ICs bought and sold every day, the market is enormous. Small companies can get big quickly. For example, the largest designer of computer processor chips is not Intel or AMD. Those two are nowhere near the level of this big-boy. The largest designer of processor chips is called ARM, and their designs are in BILLIONS of devices around the world, and that number increase by almost a billion devices each year. ARM does not make a single chip and does not sell chips, but they collect a fee for each and every one of those billions of chips.The other exciting thing about the integrated circuit market is the incredible exponential growth of the IC capabilities and the exponential decline in costs. The cost per transistor has gone from $thousands back in the 60s to nano-cents today. Computer systems today are billions of times more powerful than the systems of 1960, yet cost one-ten thousandth as much as those early systems. This exponential growth is an example of a free and open market unfettered by any form of governmental interference. Yes, the IC has some advantages over other markets. However, there is almost no other market that comes close to the IC, and there is no other market that has had a high level of competition and low level of governmental interference. The results are beyond any other market ever conceived of by the brain of humans.The second market is close to the IC but has not quite hit the same level - software. Software is an interesting market in that it is totally and utterly intellectual in nature. The non-physical nature of software means that, in theory, anyone could write software. The cost of entry into software development is the cost of a relatively cheap computer (maybe $500). Software also has one other thing going for it. Many of those billions of ICs that get created every year require software to do anything useful.Like an IC, software can get created anywhere, move anywhere, and it is easy to trade and sell. The government also does not know how to tax or regulate software instructions, so software is another highly unregulated industry. A developer can duplicate a software package as many times as needed. That means the cost of developing and selling software is tiny.The only thing that holds software back is that it is very labor-intensive. The considerable effort to create a software package limits how many and how large any one developer or group of developers can produce. However, software has an interesting feature that if you create a piece of software that is useful, you can use that piece of software on many other projects (this is called code reuse). Properly done, code reuse will allow a development team to produce many products quickly because each new product can use code from previous products.Since software is nearly free to replicate, and since it has a small cost of entry, it is easy for companies to start in a garage or basement and grow to a colossal size. Some of the largest, most profitable companies in the world are software companies that sprang up from tiny beginnings. Also, some huge and successful companies no longer exist because they ignored the simplicity of software. For example, in 1980, IBM was the largest computer company in the world. Yet, they specialized in hardware, not software. They allowed a small company named Microsoft to retain ownership of the IBM-PC operating system (known as DOS).Ignoring software was a costly mistake. While IBM is still a significant force in the computer industry, it has never recovered its number one spot. Today, IBM is still large, selling over $70 billion in goods and services. These sales pale against Microsoft's $126 billion. Yet, it is the profits that matter. IBM turns a sweet $7.9 billion in profits, but the software giant Microsoft crushed that with a whopping $36.8 billion. Yup, IBM lost out when it underestimated the value of software.Even though Microsoft makes tons of money, it faces stiff and robust competition. Many, many companies create and sell software. That means there is a hugely competitive market. On the other hand, software gets used for so many things that there is a vast number of submarkets in the software landscape. These submarkets allow competitors to grow and specialize, reducing direct competition.However, there is one competitor that all must face - free software. Since software is so inexpensive to deliver, a significant group of people has decided to make software and give it away. This "open source" software can be quite substantial. For example, the Linux operating system is a free and open-source development that anyone can get and use. The software is so good that many companies put their most critical resources on Linux platforms. Immense industries have grown up writing code that runs on Linux.Yet, Linux is not the only open-source project out there. Whenever a group of people decides they need some kind of software package, they just go ahead and create it. There are open-source projects for office software (competitors to Word and Excel), open-source games, specialty software libraries, development tools, music recording tools, web tools, software radios, operating systems, and thousands of small useful items for your computer.The open-source infrastructure is so massive, many companies (IBM being one) pay their employees to develop open-source software. While at first, this seems crazy, it is the right business decision. The company has some say in the direction of the open-source system, and the company also has access to the results. They can then put specialized software on top of the open-source package and sell the combination. Open source is the ultimate competition. If your software company makes a useful product that is very expensive, then a group of engineers will get together and make an open-source version of that product. It can sometimes be tough to compete with free.Bringing all of this information together, software is cheap to make and deliver. It has a very low barrier to entry. It can be made anywhere in the world, preventing significant government control. If a company tries to dominate the software market, it will soon see competition from open-source (free) projects. Code reuse and software libraries make it possible to create massive projects with relatively small amounts of new development. These and more mean that software development is a highly competitive and massive market.When we combine the highly competitive markets and low government control of both integrated circuits and software, we see something interesting - synergy. The two individual markets are combined by other companies to make devices that use both the IC and software. These other companies create high-value, low-cost items that address the needs and wants of billions of customers. While these devices are large enough that there is government regulation, there is so much competition that the regulation of electronics is still small compared to many other industries.What we see is something amazing. The open market of the integrated circuit created devices that require the open market of software. This combination of open markets in hardware and software allowed whole new industries to arise. These industries are also open. These companies often create devices that other companies combine and use. For example, modern commercial jetliners have thousands of electronic parts that come from hundreds of companies.The free, low government intervention, open markets of software and integrated circuits enable the free, low government intervention, open markets of electronic components, which enable new markets and products that integrate these components. The result is the pyramid of open markets generate tens of trillions of dollars of economic activity around the world each year.Not bad for something unregulated, uncontrolled, and open.