Is Antitrust Enough? |
Forgot Your Password?
New to The Nation? Subscribe
Print subscriber? Activate your online access
.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}
Tim Wu’s Age of Extraction lays out an antitrust strategy for fighting platform capitalism. But does the challenge posed by Big Tech require a new playbook?
A video still of Bill Gates walking past reporters after being hit by a cream pie in Brussels, Belgium, 2000.
In 1984, Apple aired a Super Bowl ad about smashing Big Brother. Directed by Ridley Scott, the 60-second slot featured rows of gray-uniformed drones marching in lockstep through an industrial corridor, filing into an auditorium before an enormous blue-tinted screen, their faces bathed in a phosphorescent glow as a stern technocrat proclaimed “a garden of pure ideology” free from “contradictory thoughts”—right before a woman hurled a sledgehammer at his pixelated face.
The ad’s target was unmistakable: IBM, whose blue logo and buttoned-down culture had become synonymous with corporate computing. This was the height of the American antitrust moment. The Justice Department had just shattered AT&T’s telephone monopoly and was actively pursuing IBM for forcing customers to buy hardware and software together. Apple positioned itself as the antithesis of these corporate giants, recasting personal computing as a tool of individual expression rather than bureaucratic control. Yet the company was destined to perfect the very anticompetitive practices then under federal assault: tying watches to phones, tablets to computers, storage to its cloud, apps to its store—creating an all-encompassing orbit few users escape.
The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
Today, the Justice Department wields a similar sledgehammer against Apple. In March 2024, then–Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the company of using its monopoly power to degrade competitors’ products and lock consumers into its ecosystem. When a reporter questioned Apple’s Tim Cook about the quality of iPhone-to-Android video messaging, the CEO responded with a monopolist’s candor: “Buy your mom an iPhone.” But Apple isn’t alone in the crosshairs. The Biden administration’s Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission launched a full-scale assault on Big Tech: Google faces prosecution for monopolizing search, Meta for acquiring nascent competitors, Amazon for squeezing third-party sellers, and Microsoft for trapping users in its cloud. The government’s antitrust apparatus, dormant since the Reagan years, has seemingly roared back to life. So far, the Trump administration has continued every major case, reframing them as protecting conservative speech rather than facilitating market competition. But today’s tech companies present challenges that yesterday’s monopolies never posed: Digital platforms tend toward total market capture, as network effects—in which each new user increases the platform’s value for all—create a gravitational pull toward single-firm dominance.
Tim Wu is one of the intellectual architects of this trust-busting revival. From inside Biden’s National Economic Council, he helped draft the 2021 executive order that unleashed former FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter on Silicon Valley. In The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, Wudiagnoses the pathologies of platform capitalism—the crushing of competitive dynamism, the erosion of service quality, the surveillance of users—and then prescribes antitrust as the remedy. He argues that in recent years tech platforms have shifted from enabling to “extracting” (a metaphor evoking oil rigs and strip mines rather than industries that make things) and that aggressive antitrust enforcement—breaking them up, imposing line-of-business restrictions, applying utility-style regulations—can restore “the broad spread of prosperity and democracy” that the early Internet promised. Such measures may be necessary, but Wu’s faith in Progressive-era cures underestimates his 21st-century adversary: Platform power isn’t the product of regulatory neglect but rather of institutional convergence—Big Tech’s marriage with Wall Street and its indispensability to Washington.
The Age of Extraction chronicles how today’s tech platforms came to perform the same bait-and-switch as Apple’s 1984 ad: first positioning themselves as liberators who would empower David-size challengers to the corporate Goliaths, then becoming the most powerful Goliaths in US history themselves. At the same time, the book’s analysis depends on accepting some of tech’s own self-mythology. Wu insists these firms weren’t “sinister operators.” Rather, he writes, they began as “high-minded platforms” with genuine democratic aspirations—citing as evidence Google’s 2004 IPO letter promising to “make the world a better place.” He treats their eventual transformation into “ordinary Delaware corporations answerable to shareholders and Wall Street analysts” as a fall from grace, pinpointing 2013 as the year “everything seems to have changed.” That’s when Silicon Valley’s titans stopped competing fairly and started buying up their rivals, when they pivoted from enabling small businesses to extracting their profits, when the utopian dream of Internet democracy died. The smoking gun, for Wu, was Google’s acquisition of Waze—a company that began as a crowdsourced, peer-to-peer mapping service of the kind he celebrates.
This is a narrative with a clear villain: shareholder tyranny. Why, then, does Wu not........