Tim Wu

Corey, when I'm searching on Amazon and I see that Amazon's choice looks like a little prize, like that product won a competition where a bunch of editors chose it as the best one, what am I looking at there?

But are they literally paying to be Amazon's top choice?

I mean, as a dumb consumer, maybe I look at that and I think, oh, this is some algorithmic combination of is it the best seller?

What are its reviews, etc.

?

So this really feels to me like a place where, to use Corey's word, things and shitified, that when I go around the internet now,

When I play something in a Spotify playlist or click on a song I like and move to the radio version of Spotify, or when I search something on Google or when I search something on Amazon,

These used to be very valuable services to me.

To search for something on Amazon and see rankings weighted by how popular the product is, how high the reviews are, right?

Like, I took the weighting of the search as, to some degree, a signal of quality.

Certainly, Google, the whole idea was that what comes first in search was, you know, built on PageRank and it was going to be quality.

Spotify, you know, had an algorithmic dimension to it, but it was supposed to be showing me things that people like me would like to listen to.

And now...

There is so much sponsored content in every one of these results.

And it is so unclear what is what and who is paying for what and why I'm getting this song or that result.

You know, one reason I ended up on these platforms is because I trusted these results.

And now I trust nothing.

Yeah, I mean, going back to the definition of extraction, I mean, we are kind of paying $70 billion collectively to make search worse.

So when does this move from this is just their business model, and if you want to find something else, like go buy something on Walmart, go buy something on Target, go buy something at Best Buy.

You can do all those.