Tim Wu

If you have a pharmaceutical, people are willing to pay $70,000 for it.

That means they value it at $70,000, even if you think that is extractive.

So how do you know when a price, when a profit is,

is actually extractive versus when we're just seeing that people value that product very highly and bully on the producer for creating something people value so highly.

Yeah.

So if someone, for example, has no choice, but they are desperate, let's say, for water, and someone is able to sell them a bottle of water because they're dying for $100,000 or something like that, yes, that person does value it at that level.

But we would like to have an economy, and every economist would agree with this, is that an economy full of nothing but

maximize monopoly prices where people are in a position to extract, is inefficient for two reasons.

One is too much money gets spent on that water versus other things like maybe pursuing an education.

And second, that the entity that holds that much power actually has an impulse to reduce supply, reduce output.

and therefore produce less of the stuff so that they can extract the higher price.

I mean, this is just classic monopoly economics, I guess I'm getting into.

Everyone inside themselves has something they are willing to pay.

But that doesn't mean it's a good society when you're constantly paying the maximum you are willing to pay in every situation.

For many of these platforms, for a Facebook, for a TikTok, we're not paying for them.

So when you say they are extractive, what are they extracting and from whom?

So when you use Facebook, you are constantly being mined for your time, attention, and data in a way that is extraordinarily valuable and that, you know, yielded something like $67 billion in profit last year.

You know, things that feel free isn't free.

when you suddenly spend hours wandering around random things you didn't intend to?

Is it free when you end up buying stuff you didn't really want and wonder why you get it later?