UK Politics

I suspect that what the person you replied to, meant with “meaningfully improve the lives of US citizens” was that the amount Apple contributes to the GDP of the USA (odd, since much of the goods aren’t domestically produced) is disproportionately high compared to its impact on quality of life of people in the US as a whole.

They seemed a bit confused about the terms they were using, but your glosses don't help, I'm afraid. 'Meaningfully improve' isn't qualified but neither is your 'disproportionately high': 'disproportionate' according to whom and by what metric? A quick search suggests something like 150 million people in the US own an iPhone. It's only by engaging in complex foreign trade that Apple can make and sell their products at the price points they currently use; the foreign aspect of the trade direct impacts every one of those 150 million people by making their phones cheaper. They presumably feel their lives are improved by it. And that's just the iPhone, not counting Apple's various other products, nor the businesses that depend on those products (and the people that depend on the businesses).

So, big tech arguably has a disproportionately large economic impact due to those dependencies. To be clear, I'm not saying this is certainly the case; my point is that the trade companies like Apple engage in is important, it does benefits US citizens in all kinds of ways (direct and indirect) and it makes perfect sense to use GDP as a rough measure of those impacts alongside other metrics.

Colonialism didn’t begin with international trade

Yes, it did. It began with people trading across increasing distances, then trying to secure those trade routes (by conquering people along the way), then trying to secure the production itself at source (by conquering the regions where the products were found, grown or made). The Romans conquered the Mediterranean because it was their most important trade route; Columbus was trying to open up new trade routes.