I think the significant thing is what it meant for the structure of the economy.

Because this idea that Amazon was sort of going to liberate a whole class of sort of small businesses and medium-sized businesses really started to change.

And the direction in which the money is flowing went into the platforms.

It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Kate Klonick, senior editor at Lawfare. And I'm Alan Rosenstein,

research director at Lawfare. And we're here with Tim Wu, Julia Silver, Professor of Law,

science and technology at Columbia Law School. I want to live in a society where more broadly, people think

not in terms of how do I get in a position to extract, but can I invest and see some return on

that investment? What kind of sense of economic liberty do I have? Am I going to invest in my career and my education and get

something out of it? Or is it all about just trying to find him being in the right place, the right

time? Today we're talking about his new book, The Age of Extraction, how tech platforms

conquered the economy and threatened our future prosperity. Tim is perhaps one of the most widely read and cited scholars in technology and law.

He coined the term net neutrality.

He's written the master switch, attention merchants, the curse of vagueness,

and my personal favorite, who controls the internet with Jack Goldsmith.

They're all essential reading.

And he is recently back at Columbia after being in the Biden administration, where he led

much of their work on

competition and antitrust policies. Let's start with what I take to be your, the key thesis

of the book. So just explain why you think the modern problem is with these tech platforms.

And maybe also I'm curious why you think they're worse than previous generations of monopolies,

right? So like what makes a Google or an Amazon different from, let's say, a standard oil?

Well, let me start at the beginning. So I think the problem, I guess I'll put it this way,

...