Who Broke the Internet? Part III
The paradox of “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.”
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in PDX at Barnes and Noble with BUNNIE HUANG on June 20. The last two stops are in London (Jul 1) and Manchester (Jul 2).
Episode 3 of “Understood: Who Broke the Internet?” (my new CBC podcast about enshittification) just dropped. It’s called “In God We Antitrust,” and it’s great:
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16147052-in-god-we-antitrust
The thesis of this four-part series is pretty straightforward: the enshittification of the internet was the result of an enshittogenic policy environment. Platforms always had the technical means to scam us and abuse us. Tech founders and investors always included a cohort of scumbags who would trade our happiness and wellbeing for their profits. What changed was the consequences of giving in to those impulses. When Google took off, its founders’ mantra was “competition is just a click away.” If someone built a better search engine, users could delete their google.com bookmarks, just like they did to their altavista.com bookmarks when Google showed up.
Policymakers — not technologists or VCs — changed the environment so that this wasn’t true anymore:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman
In last week’s episode, we told the story of Bruce Lehman, the Clinton administration’s Copyright Czar, who swindled the US government into passing a law that made it illegal to mod, hack, reverse-engineer or otherwise improve on an existing technology:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/13/ctrl-ctrl-ctrl/#free-dmitry
This neutralized a powerful anti-enshittificatory force: interoperability. All digital tech is born interoperable, because of the intrinsic characteristics of computers, their flexibility. This means that tech is inherently enshittification-resistant. When a company enshittifies its products or services, its beleaguered users and suppliers don’t have to wait for a regulator to punish it. They don’t have to wait for a competitor to challenge it.
Interoperable tools — ad-blockers, privacy blockers, alternative clients, mods, plugins, firmware patches and other hacks — offer immediate, profound relief from enshittification. Every ten foot pile of shit that a tech company drops into your life can be met with an eleven foot ladder of disenshittifying, interoperable technology.
That’s why Lehman’s successful attack on tinkering was so devastating. Before Lehman, tech had achieved a kind of pro-user equilibrium: every time a company made its products worse, they had to confront a thousand guerrilla technologists who unilaterally unfucked things: third party printer ink, file-format compatibility, protocol compatibility, all the way up to Unix, a massive operating system that was painstakingly re-created, piece by piece, in free software.
Lehman offered would-be enshittifiers a way to shift this equilibrium to full enshittification: just stick a digital lock on your product. It didn’t even matter if the lock worked — under Lehman’s anticircumvention law, tampering with a lock, even talking about weaknesses in a lock, became a literal felony, punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500K fine. Lehman’s law was an offer no tech boss would refuse, and enshittification ate the world.
But Lehman’s not the only policymaker who was warned about the consequences of his terrible plans, who ignored the warnings, and who disclaims any responsibility for the shitty world that followed. Long before Lehman’s assault on tech policy, another group of lawyers and economists laid waste to competition policy.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Chicago School economists conceived of an absurd new way to interpret competition law, which they called “the consumer welfare standard.” Under this standard, the job of competition policy was to encourage monopolies to form, on the grounds that monopolies were “efficient” and would lower prices for “consumers.”
The chief proponent of this standard was Robert Bork, a virulent racist whose most significant claim to fame was that he was the only government lawyer willing to help Richard Nixon illegally fire officials who wouldn’t turn a blind eye to his crimes. Bork’s long record of unethical behavior and scorching bigotry came back to bite him in the ass when Ronald Reagan tried to seat him on the Supreme Court, during a confirmation hearing that Bork screwed up so badly that even today, we use “borked” as a synonym for anything that is utterly fucked.
But Bork’s real legacy was as a pro-monopoly propagandist, whose work helped shift how judges, government enforcers, and economists viewed antitrust law. Bork approached the text of America’s antitrust laws, like the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, with the same techniques as a Qanon follower addressing a Q “drop,” applying gnostic techniques to find in these laws mystical coded language that — he asserted — meant that Congress had intended for America’s anti-monopoly laws to actually support monopolies.
In episode three, we explore Bork’s legacy, and how it led to what Tom Eastman calls the internet of “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.” We got great interviews and old tape for this one, including Michael Wiesel, a Canadian soap-maker who created a bestselling line of nontoxic lip-balm kits for kids, only to have Amazon shaft him by underselling him with his own product.
But the most interesting interview was with Lina Khan, the generational talent who became the youngest-ever FTC chair under Joe Biden, and launched an all-out assault on American monopolies and their vile depredations:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion
Khan’s extraordinary rise to power starts with a law review paper she wrote in her third year at Yale, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which became the first viral law review article in history:
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox
“Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” was a stinging rebuke to Bork and his theories, using Amazon’s documented behavior to show that after Amazon used its monopoly power to lower prices and drive rivals out of the market, it subsequently raised prices. And, contrary to Bork’s theories, those new, high prices didn’t conjure up new rivals who would enter the market with lower prices again, eager to steal Amazon’s customers away. Instead, Amazon’s demonstrated willingness to cross-subsidize divisions gigantic losses to destroy any competitor with below-cost pricing created a “kill zone” of businesses adjacent to the giant’s core enterprise that no one dared enter:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-biden-can-clean-up-obamas-big
The clarity of Khan’s writing, combined with her careful research and devastating conclusions dragged a vast crowd of people who’d never paid much attention to antitrust — including me! — into the fray. No wonder that four years later, she was appointed to serve as the head of the FTC, making her the most powerful consumer rights regulator in the world.
We live in an age of monopolies, with cartels dominating every part of our lives, acting as “autocrats of trade” and “kings over the necessaries of life,” the corporate dictators that Senator John Sherman warned about when he was stumping for the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/
Bork and his co-religionists created this age. They’re the reason we live in world where we have to get our “necessaries of life” from a cartel, a duopoly or a monopoly. It’s not because the great forces of history transformed the economy — it’s because of these dickheads:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
This episode of “Understood: Who Borked the Internet?” draws a straight line from those economists and their ideas to the world we live in today. It sets up the final episode, next week’s “Kick ’Em in the Dongle,” which charts a course for us to escape from the hellscape created by Bork, Lehman, and their toadies and trolls.
You can get “Understood: Who Broke the Internet?” in any podcast app, even the seriously enshittified ones (which, let’s be real here, is most of them). Here’s a direct link to the RSS:
https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/19/khan-thought/#they-were-warned
