Tim Wu

What specifically do you mean?

It's a good question, and I've spent a lot of my life exposed to that.

But I think what's important about utility regulation is what it doesn't allow to happen.

Like the electric networks, the electric utility regulators are not perfect.

On the other hand, if you think about the electric network, it has been an extraordinary foundation for people to build stuff on.

And the reason they're able to build on it is they don't think the electric network is going to take like half their profits if you invent the computer on top of it.

Or they don't think that, for example, the electric network is going to decide that, you know, it likes Samsung toasters instead of like LG, I don't know, whoever else's toasters, Zenith, something like that.

So they don't discriminate between manufacturers on the electric network.

And so I think we need to understand and look carefully at which part of the platforms are the most like the electric network or the broadband network where they are essential to the rest of business and therefore need to play by different rules.

And some of those main rules, the most obvious are duties of treating everybody the same so they don't play favorites.

And then if you've got it figured out, you get to the question of price regulation.

Maybe Amazon's margin be capped at 30% or something like that.

And then number three for you?

Number three, I think we need a constant, you know, I'm an anti-monopoly kind of guy, constant pressure on the main tech platforms so that they stay, I guess, insecure in their position and aren't able to easily counter new forms of competition.

I think you have to take out of the picture the easiest ways of tamping down or eliminating challenges to your monopoly.

I think that's been a really important thing in U.S.

tech since AT&T, since IBM, since Microsoft, of keeping the main dominant market players insecure and force them to succeed, to improve themselves, as opposed to buying off their competitors or excluding them.

So that's my third.

So before we wrap here, I want to return to something we've sort of been circling, which is what kind of competition do we want to be encouraging among these platforms?

Tim, one thing you said earlier was there can be this difference between healthy competition and toxic competition, which if you read a lot of economic commentary from the early 20th century, you hear a lot about that.