Hidden Forces How Big Tech Weaponized the Internet and How to Fix It | Tim Wu
13 snips
Feb 16, 2026 
Tim Wu, Columbia Law professor and former White House tech advisor, joins to diagnose platform power. He traces the internet’s shift from open creativity to attention-extracting platforms. Discussion covers how platforms became gatekeepers, their ad-driven incentives, social and civic harms, AI-fueled content floods, and potential policy fixes like antitrust and new business models.
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Platform Power Replaced Industrial Dominance
- Platform power is the central economic force of our era and not entirely new compared to past revolutions.
- Control of essential bottlenecks gives platforms leverage over production, distribution, and markets.
Net Neutrality's Lesson Applies To Platforms
- Net neutrality protected innovation by forcing infrastructure to treat traffic equally and enabled new services to run on incumbents' networks.
- Platforms have become essential infrastructure too, and lacking rules over them risks repeating old monopolistic harms.
Matching Is The Core Of Platform Value
- Platforms act as intermediaries that match parties and extract value by controlling catalytic bottlenecks.
- The richest modern firms monetize matching, trust-building, and distribution economies at scale.
