Tim Wu

They know there are other things out there, and they're not clamoring for a competitor or an alternative.

I think suggesting that there is no capacity to switch is going a little far.

Tim, I want to go to your story here.

One of the core tales you tell in your book is about Amazon.

So walk me through the process of moving a platform from a kind of healthy, constructive platform to become an extractive platform through your kind of story of what happened with Amazon.

So back in the 90s, when people were thinking about what is going to be great about the internet, there was this great, really serious promise that it was going to make a lot of people rich.

It was going to distribute wealth in new ways.

And when people talked about how that was going to happen, a lot of it was like, well, you know, everyone's going to be able to have their own store, sell stuff, and people are going to make a lot of money that way.

So that was a big promise, and I think it was an important promise.

Back in the day, it was mostly eBay that people were talking about.

So then you have Amazon.

Amazon, as you may remember, was once upon a time a bookstore.

That's how old I am.

And, you know, their basic idea was to be bigger and sell more stuff.

At some point, they opened the marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, which was different because it was a platform.

In other words, it was a place that people could come and sell their stuff.

At first, it was used books, then it spread into other markets, and they realized a few things.

One is that fulfillment would be very important.

eBay in the old days, the sellers had to wrap it themselves and send it off, so that wasn't a very scalable model.

And they had a good search engine, Amazon invested hard in search, and it worked.