You prefer your monopolies to not be democratically accountable?
I prefer no monopolies, but if it's something that is a natural monopoly, I certainly don't want it by a for profit foreign company.
Maybe the answer is to split these guys up by country and each government decides what they do with their chunk. We'll see which works best.
Independent not for profits, straight up nationalised, private still(baby Bell), publicly owned and privately run, etc etc.
Linus's VFS is where the 256 limit is hard. Some Linux filesystem, like RaiserFS, go way beyond it. If it was a big deal, it would be patched and widely spread. The magic of Linux, is you can try it yourself, run your own fork and submit patches.
LUKS is the one to talk about as the others aren't as good an approach in general. LUKS is the recommended approach.
Edit: oh and NTFS is 512 bytes. UTF16 = 16bit = 2 bytes. 256*2 = 512