Cory Doctorow

Now, they will eventually.

When Facebook is terrible enough, that community will shatter and maybe it will never reform.

That is not a good outcome.

I do remember that, actually.

So that is broadly part of this thing Tim was discussing, where they're piling on junk fees for the right to be at the top of the results.

Sometimes it's more subtle where if you're not paying for Prime and paying for fulfillment by Amazon and paying for all these other things, you aren't eligible.

And the more of these you buy, the greater chance you have of being chosen.

So you're right that it is algorithmic, but the algorithmic inputs are not grounded primarily in things like quality or customer satisfaction.

They're grounded in how many different ways you've made your business dependent on Amazon in such a way that every dollar you make is having more and more of that dollar extracted by Amazon customers.

There's some good empirical work on this from Maria Mazzucato and Tim O'Reilly, where they calculate that the first result on an Amazon search engine results page on average is 17% more expensive than the best match for your search.

So that's what you're seeing is basically the Amazon top choice is the worst choice.

But doesn't do anything with it internally until there's a competitor that threatens them.

Yeah, I think when you look at these companies and their acquisitions, what you see is that these companies very quickly suffer from what both Brandeis and Tim called the curse of bigness.

that they find it very hard to bring an actual product to market that they invent in-house.

When you look at Google, they've had like one really successful consumer-facing product launch, and that was in the previous millennium.

And almost everything they made in this millennium failed.

It either didn't launch, or after it launched, they shut it down.

Whereas their giant successes, their video stack, their ad tech stack,

documents, collaboration, maps, navigation, server management, mobile, right?

These are companies they acquired from someone else and operationalized.