The Internet's Tollbooth Operators

[Celerity]

Tim Wu’s ‘The Age of Extraction’ chronicles the way Big Tech platforms have turned against their users.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/10/internets-tollbooth-operators-wu-review/





When the British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee first imagined a network of interlinked documents in the late 1980s, he envisioned something as vast as the cosmos and as open as the sky—a medium in which knowledge would circulate as freely as air. “This is for everyone,” he typed during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies in London, reaffirming the principle that had guided him from the start: universality. (It’s also the title of his new book.) The early web was public infrastructure, not private property, an experiment in what he called “intercreativity,” the ability of groups to make things together.

That aspiration is the distant mirror of the world Tim Wu, Joe Biden’s lead adviser for competition policy in the first two years of his presidency and now a law professor at Columbia, surveys in The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. He addresses the gnawing sense that everything online, from shopping to streaming to socializing, has been designed not for us but against us. The book follows Wu’s earlier works like The Master Switch, The Attention Merchants, and The Curse of Bigness, offering an accessible genealogy of how societies have built, depended on, and been constrained by systems that mediate access to daily life. Digital platforms hoard personal data, degrade their own products, and devise ever more insidious ways to hold our attention; The Age of Extraction chronicles the loss of control that accompanies this destructive capacity.



Wu, who coined the phrase “net neutrality” and helped shape the modern case for tech regulation, released his book just as Big Tech’s political power grows—its top oligarchs flanked President Trump at his inauguration—and as the backlash to their dominance and what it has done to daily life fortifies and expands. Just two months ago in these pages, the Prospect reviewed author and internet activist Cory Doctorow’s streetwise, uncommonly lucid account of the perils of the platform giants: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It. It’s not surprising that the two worldviews are similar: Wu and Doctorow attended the same elementary school in Toronto.

Doctorow’s observations are lacerating, and he has a gift for the grotesque analogy. Yet his argument in Enshittification never feels doctrinaire. Beneath his pamphleteer’s fury is a technologist’s love for what the web once promised and might still become. He reminds us that the internet’s decline wasn’t inevitable—it was policy-driven. Antitrust law atrophied. Venture capital rewarded growth over governance. Where Doctorow rages from the barricades, Wu lectures from the front of the seminar room. His book, though slimmer and less acrobatic, carries the weight of a seasoned antitrust scholar. Yet he doesn’t avoid gut-level revulsion: In a section about Amazon, he likens the company’s ad racket, which charges third-party sellers premium fees for high placement in search results, to a “Tony Soprano school of business” shakedown.

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