Growing up in Toronto, Tim Wu had a classmate who was the progeny of Communist parents. His name was Cory Doctorow. Yes, the same guy who just published a book about enshittification. Though they shared a general world view, the boyhood pals also had arguments, with Wu typically taking a less radical stance than his buddy. “I read the Communist Manifesto in the eighth grade,” says Doctorow. “It was pretty reasonable.” Though the pair lost touch, they reconnected over the last couple of decades and are now friendlier than ever.
The relationship is worth mentioning because Wu—law professor, former FTC adviser, and Joe Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy—just published a book called The Age of Extraction—a high-minded companion to Doctorow’s gritty polemic. Both of them explain how tech platforms, once they get their claws in you, shift from serving you to serving themselves. As you might expect, Wu’s version tilts heavily toward the idea that our current Gilded-Age-level consumer abuse should be tamed by aggressive antitrust action.
Like a prosecutor skillfully laying out a case, Wu explains how platforms like Amazon, Google, and Meta use their market power and stickiness to exploit people’s habits and laziness. Ultimately, platforms extract their users’ money–through higher prices as well as fees and taxes levied at developers who use the platforms for commerce. The book poses a question regarding business empires: “How can their power be balanced to ensure broad prosperity for everyone?” Wu’s answer in part reverts to history—how regulators tamed AT&T, IBM, and others, and how technological advances like the internet reshuffled the deck and enabled new players to enter the market.
This is a bit at odds with the other premise of the book—that if regulators don’t curb platform power, “we risk a future in which our technologies help make the division and resentment that is the curse of our age.” Left hanging is the central question of the next four years—what are the chances that the Trump administration gets it right?
Extract Nation
In my view, Wu is a national treasure. He coined the term net neutrality. (The concept—which assures nondiscriminatory access to platforms—has been momentarily beaten down by the courts.) During the Biden days, he, along with FTC chair Lina Khan and assistant attorney general for antitrust Jonathan Kanter, helped thaw out what he calls Antitrust Winter, a free-for-all era of corporate consolidation and anticompetitive practices that empowered Big Tech.
He’s also a good writer. One felicitous trick in his bag is the invocation of obscure, even ancient precedents that provide illuminating insights into contemporary conundrums. To explain the value of net neutrality, Wu tells the tale of a 14th century Englishwoman who was refused lodging at a rural inn for unspecified reasons, and found herself abandoned in the dark; her successful court challenge established the principle that a “public house” must be open to the public.
The Age of Extraction is the third in a trilogy consisting of The Master Switch (about the importance of open platforms) and The Attention Merchants (which focused on how social media and online ads infected the media ecosystem).
