Quark's is special circumstances, I'll give you that. It's the main one that came to mind though, and it's part of civilian life on DS9 for all that it's not necessarily part of the Fed.Formless wrote:I'd agree with you, but your examples aren't great. Quark's does not qualify as Federation: he is a Ferengi doing business on a Bajoran space station, despite Starfleet administrating the place as part of whatever diplomatic deal the Federation made with Bajor.
Its also possible that those corporations are government owned, you know, or operate on Federation planets that don't stick dogmatically to Earth's style of socialism. In much the same way that there are now stores selling cannabis here in Colorado, but you can't find them in Texas just a few hundred miles south of here. Each planet seems to retain some level of sovereignty or self administration.
The corporations are an interesting question as there's not much data on them. However, they do exist. They may have been neutered to the point where they are essentially research arms of the government, or they may be developing new technologies and building resources for the Fed remunerating them. We simply don't know one way or another.
And that's really the problem. All of Trek that we've seen, aside from brief glimpses which don't really add up to a whole lot, has been Starfleet for the most part. There really has been little to no civilian world-building. Bit of a shame really, but that's the model they started with and it wouldn't necessarily work to depart too far from it.
