If you look at trends Late capitalism must be when markets became increasingly top heavy with ever escalating layers of state intervention favouring mega corps and entrenched players. Which resulted in things like the housing supply crisis or the destruction of small banks, where the banking market was reduced to 5 megabanks because after every market fluctuation new rules get added which only megabanks can afford (and these rules keep coming and coming https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/business/banks-capital-ba...). There's a ton of other examples in pharma, retail, farming, etc.
After the next few media cycles of AI doomerism and fear mongering we're probably going to see the same thing with AI where any minor risk is intolerable to gov technocrats so they'll make controls where only some megacorp like OpenAI or Google, who has friends and lawyers in the right places, gets to operate with a green light and small players will need to hire a team of lawyers and developers to enforce an ever growing list of controls.
You don't need state intervention to get monopolies; actually it's quite the opposite - economies of scale push for consolidation, and you eventually need government to intervene. Whatever it was known for, the Gilded Era doesn't seem to be associated with large-scale government regulation, but you certainly had mega corps. And given enough leeway, the mega corps will start to take on functions you'd normally associate with government - company tows, stores, and scrip as examples.
After the next few media cycles of AI doomerism and fear mongering we're probably going to see the same thing with AI where any minor risk is intolerable to gov technocrats so they'll make controls where only some megacorp like OpenAI or Google, who has friends and lawyers in the right places, gets to operate with a green light and small players will need to hire a team of lawyers and developers to enforce an ever growing list of controls.