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In 2035 the legal committees changed the corporation governance laws to provide that stock could not be a perpetuity, and also that employees and sometimes regulators had board seats. It also meant that stockholders no longer had a monopoly on investors' board seats: they had to share investor seats with other classes of investors. Also, many of the board seats were taken by employee representatives and, in some special cases, regulators. Stocks had to be paid out by combining principle and dividends in the standard quarterly dividend distribution; this meant that stocks eventually terminated.
In some categories large corporations have broken up (chain stores and fast-food restaurants are examples) while other areas have started consolidations.
The original Birthright Lottery collapsed under the weight of too many boys and corruption due to attempts to get birthrights. It was replaced by a new lottery system.
The new lottery was organized in tiers: an application for a birthright would be placed in one of the tiers based on the family income, family stability, number of children, age, genetics, educational attainment and other factors. The availible birthrights were distributed through the tiers, with the top tiers getting all of their requests, and the lower tiers getting birthrights assigned by lottery. It was possible to have a request legally bumped up several tiers by paying a hefty fee.
The lottery was set up to reduce the number of children each quarter by 1% of the difference between the starting population and replacement for the target population per quarter. The estimate was that it would reach replacement in 25 years, but it actually took longer because people started living longer.
To offset the previous glut of boys, the new system was biased to overproduce girls. It was simply easier to get a request for a girl approved. Since the higher tiers tended to get most of the boys, the only way the lower tiers could get a boy was to take a random choice: they produced more boys than asking for one. The original intention was to shift back to equal numbers of each, but the still very influential ultra-conservatives kept it biased in favor of girls until the sexual imbalance became part of the social landscape.
One of the areas seeing a consolidation was slave kennels and ponygirl stables. The primary reason for the consolidation was the regulatory situation: larger organizations could afford specialized in-house expertise.
The situation eventually settled into one major chain of generalist slave kennels: The Slave Warehouse. The Slave Warehouse offers kenneling and high volume standard training services, and pretty much sticks to its core competency as a merchant kennel. Other niche organizations have sprung up, but most of them have also rapidly gone out of business.
The various small ponygirl operations rapidly consolidated into Excelsior Stables and Kennels. This left two major chains in the ponygirl business: Excelsior and the Premier Ponygirl Organization. Excelsior differs substantially from the Premier Ponygirl Organization: it has stabling and kenneling operations and also individual consumer operations, both for people who like to take ponygirl rides but don't want to own their own ponygirl, and for people who want to experiment with being ponygirls. PPO is strictly a manufacturing operation.
At this point in time, Excelsior has a strict policy of not allowing ponygirl stable stays unless the ponygirl has a slave contract. Originally they required a full Transferable Unrestricted Use contract. After The Slave Warehouse's kennel contracts stabilized, they shifted to using their own version of a kennel contract.
Excelsior uses almost the same set of DNA mods as the PPO, but it packages them in four stages. The first stage is the foot and ankle enhancements from the fashion industry: they make wearing pony boots easy and comfortable. The second stage is the metabolic and lower body changes except for the tail and hooves. The third stage is the upper body changes, and the fourth stage is the tail and hooves. The latter is only given to full time ponygirls, and all of them get it. Whether full time ponygirls are given a mane is a bit inconsistent, similarly to the PPO.
Agriculture was another sector where there were both major breakdowns and consolidations. Highly distributed agricultural businesses broke down for the same reasons as chain stores and fast food chains broke down: local employees didn't see a whole lot of benefit in home office deadwood. They consolidated locally, however, because larger organizations were both more efficient and could eventually have enough built-up capital to avoid having to go to the banks.
The Contract Machine system continued to pick up functionality.Biotechnology
The DNA modification business started to grow boutique operations for custom DNA modifications. The Health Service identified dealing with partial inheritance of DNA modifications as a major expense issue, and started a project to manage them. This would eventually bear fruit in 2066.
The amateur DNA modification business started winding down, but not before there were several dozen part human, part something else varieties. These included ponies, centaurs, kitties and puppies. Elsewhere there were riding cats and mers.
Some idiot (probably in the Outlaw Nations) invented a process to precipitate solid stone from sea water, and seeded the Drake Passage between South American and Antarctica with it. It wasn't noticed for a couple of decades; by the time anyone noticed it had totally blocked the Southern Current, and rearranged the worldwide ocean currents enough to start thawing Antarctica. The thaw happened over several decades; the rising ocean level and generally higher temperatures worldwide precipitated a major crisis.
Suggestions to use nukes to destroy the dike were eventually turned down; the world decided to simply muddle though.