In 1984, Apple aired a Super Bowl ad about smashing Big Brother. Directed by Ridley Scott, the 60-second slot featured rows of gray-uniformed drones marching in lockstep through an industrial corridor, filing into an auditorium before an enormous blue-tinted screen, their faces bathed in a phosphorescent glow as a stern technocrat proclaimed “a garden of pure ideology” free from “contradictory thoughts”—right before a woman hurled a sledgehammer at his pixelated face.

The ad’s target was unmistakable: IBM, whose blue logo and buttoned-down culture had become synonymous with corporate computing. This was the height of the American antitrust moment. The Justice Department had just shattered AT&T’s telephone monopoly and was actively pursuing IBM for forcing customers to buy hardware and software together. Apple positioned itself as the antithesis of these corporate giants, recasting personal computing as a tool of individual expression rather than bureaucratic control. Yet the company was destined to perfect the very anticompetitive practices then under federal assault: tying watches to phones, tablets to computers, storage to its cloud, apps to its store—creating an all-encompassing orbit few users escape.

Today, the Justice Department wields a similar sledgehammer against Apple. In March 2024, then–Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the company of using its monopoly power to degrade competitors’ products and lock consumers into its ecosystem. When a reporter questioned Apple’s Tim Cook about the quality of iPhone-to-Android video messaging, the CEO responded with a monopolist’s candor: “Buy your mom an iPhone.” But Apple isn’t alone in the crosshairs. The Biden administration’s Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission launched a full-scale assault on Big Tech: Google faces prosecution for monopolizing search, Meta for acquiring nascent competitors, Amazon for squeezing third-party sellers, and Microsoft for trapping users in its cloud. The government’s antitrust apparatus, dormant since the Reagan years, has seemingly roared back to life. So far, the Trump administration has continued every major case, reframing them as protecting conservative speech rather than facilitating market competition. But today’s tech companies present challenges that yesterday’s monopolies never posed: Digital platforms tend toward total market capture, as network effects—in which each new user increases the platform’s value for all—create a gravitational pull toward single-firm dominance.

Tim Wu is one of the intellectual architects of this trust-busting revival. From inside Biden’s National Economic Council, he helped draft the 2021 executive order that unleashed former FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter on Silicon Valley. In The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, Wudiagnoses the pathologies of platform capitalism—the crushing of competitive dynamism, the erosion of service quality, the surveillance of users—and then prescribes antitrust as the remedy. He argues that in recent years tech platforms have shifted from enabling to “extracting” (a metaphor evoking oil rigs and strip mines rather than industries that make things) and that aggressive antitrust enforcement—breaking them up, imposing line-of-business restrictions, applying utility-style regulations—can restore “the broad spread of prosperity and democracy” that the early Internet promised. Such measures may be necessary, but Wu’s faith in Progressive-era cures underestimates his 21st-century adversary: Platform power isn’t the product of regulatory neglect but rather of institutional convergence—Big Tech’s marriage with Wall Street and its indispensability to Washington.

The Age of Extraction chronicles how today’s tech platforms came to perform the same bait-and-switch as Apple’s 1984 ad: first positioning themselves as liberators who would empower David-size challengers to the corporate Goliaths, then becoming the most powerful Goliaths in US history themselves. At the same time, the book’s analysis depends on accepting some of tech’s own self-mythology. Wu insists these firms weren’t “sinister operators.” Rather, he writes, they began as “high-minded platforms” with genuine democratic aspirations—citing as evidence Google’s 2004 IPO letter promising to “make the world a better place.” He treats their eventual transformation into “ordinary Delaware corporations answerable to shareholders and Wall Street analysts” as a fall from grace, pinpointing 2013 as the year “everything seems to have changed.” That’s when Silicon Valley’s titans stopped competing fairly and started buying up their rivals, when they pivoted from enabling small businesses to extracting their profits, when the utopian dream of Internet democracy died. The smoking gun, for Wu, was Google’s acquisition of Waze—a company that began as a crowdsourced, peer-to-peer mapping service of the kind he celebrates.

This is a narrative with a clear villain: shareholder tyranny. Why, then, does Wu not trace “the end of the era when the Internet was seen as the great equalizer” to 2004, when Google’s shares debuted on the NASDAQ? Or to 2001, when venture capitalists made Google’s idealistic young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, hire Eric Schmidt as their adult-supervisor CEO? Or to 1999, when those same founders first accepted checks from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital—which expected a hefty return on their investment? Wu concedes that “over time, structure beats out good intentions.” But his analysis stops short of the structure’s origins—in the term sheets, the board seats, the liquidation preferences, and the growth metrics imposed by venture capitalists on day one. Of course, investors could colonize the Internet only after it had become commercial territory—the 1995 decommissioning of NSFNet transformed a public research network into private property. The platforms didn’t gradually succumb to structural pressure; they were built from the ground up to satisfy it.

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Wu recognizes that financial imperatives determine tech companies’ behavior—what they build, whom they hire, how they monetize—but neglects to treat their funding architecture as a legitimate site for political intervention. This exposes an inherent limit to the antitrust solution. Antitrust, by its nature, is reactive: It investigates monopolies after they form, blocks mergers after they’re proposed, extracts settlements after violations occur. Google faced no scrutiny while building its search monopoly, only after it started spending $26 billion annually to maintain it. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp with barely a regulatory whisper; the FTC only sued years later, after the damage was done. Antitrust can’t raise the dead—the Amazon third-party sellers bankrupted by fees, the app developers drained by Apple’s 30 percent tax. Worse, it can’t even affect the incentive structures that compel a growth-at-all-costs mentality: the carried interest that VCs want to earn, the quarterly growth that Wall Street demands, the burn rates that require monopoly pricing to recoup.

Over time, antitrust victories often prove illusory: They reshuffle the balance of power within the existing tech-finance ecosystem, while small independent businesses remain trapped in the same vise. Blocking Google’s $20 billion payment to Apple would supposedly foster search competition, but the European Union’s experience shows the likely outcome. When the EU mandated choice screens for Android, they became pay-to-play auctions that benefited Microsoft’s Bing, while mission-driven alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia were largely priced out. Had the Justice Department’s proposed Chrome sale gone forward, the only potential buyers would have been Google’s peers: OpenAI and Perplexity, AI venture darlings flush with Microsoft and Bezos money, respectively. The TikTok negotiations—though not an antitrust matter—revealed the limited pool of possible acquirers: Only software behemoths like Oracle, sovereign-wealth funds like MGX, or buyout kings like Silver Lake and KKR have the resources to put up. Antitrust effectively referees turf wars between corporate rivals. None of these scenarios is likely to spawn garage start-ups; in each, the victors are existing tech giants, venture capital, and private equity.

Wu’s faith in antitrust rests on historical precedent, particularly the breakup of the Bell monopoly. When AT&T resisted competitors offering services over its lines, the Federal Communications Commission imposed “computer inquiries” rules mandating equal access, and the Justice Department ultimately split AT&T into seven regional “Baby Bells.” According to Wu, this forced opening birthed the online services industry by allowing small developers to build atop the telephone network.

But today’s platform monopolies rest on different foundations. AT&T controlled the physical infrastructure—copper wires, switching stations, telephone poles—reaching American homes. These lines were the only route to customers; without access to Bell’s system, nothing could be built. Software obeys different rules: It faces no such scarcity constraints. It is infinitely replicable; unlike physical infrastructure, opening platform assets to competition would multiply extraction points—competitors would gain access to the same code, algorithms, or data that drive monetization. When PayPal split from eBay in 2015, both retained their historical transaction data—two companies with the ability to mine the same purchases and behavioral patterns for separate profit. The Justice Department’s proposal to spin off Google’s ad tech business exposes a deeper trap: Without Google’s data, the divested unit dies; with it, the monopoly persists. With Judge Amit Mehta’s recent order requiring Google to share user query data with competitors, Wu’s extraction problem isn’t eliminated but rather syndicated—the same data, the same targeting, just more extractors.

Wu finds another supposed triumph of antitrust in IBM’s 1969 decision to unbundle software from hardware. Throughout the 1960s, IBM dominated mainframe computing through what Wu sees as the crucial barrier: selling software and hardware as an inseparable package, blocking independent developers from accessing “the first true computing platform.” When the upstart Control Data Corporation’s CDC 6600 outperformed IBM’s fastest machines, the computing leader responded not by innovating but by threatening to cut off defecting customers from its other products and announcing a nonexistent rival machine. Facing antitrust pressure, CEO Thomas Watson Jr. chose unbundling to avoid a potentially devastating breakup. Wu credits this moment—he calls it “Independence Day” for software—with spawning thousands of companies, launching Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison, and creating Silicon Valley itself. His proof lies in an international comparison: Japan maintained integrated computing and never developed an independent software sector outside of gaming—evidence, Wu claims, that market structure determines technological destiny.

But this story is incomplete. Wu credits unbundling for US software supremacy, but Japan’s struggles had little to do with market structure. From the start, systemic constraints thwarted Japanese success: The Fujitsu-Hitachi trade-secret affair established a pattern of legal confrontation; ASCII standards made Japanese systems inherently incompatible with Western software; federal “Buy American” provisions barred Japanese firms from US government procurement, defense contracts, and university purchases—the same markets that subsidized US software development. As Japanese computing gained ground in the 1980s—controlling 80 percent of global memory chips, matching American supercomputer performance, pioneering laptop design—the Reagan administration unleashed a multipronged economic assault. The 1985 Plaza Accord engineered a 50 percent appreciation of the yen against the dollar, making Japanese exports uncompetitive overnight. The 1986 Semiconductor Trade Agreement imposed quotas and price floors on Japanese chips; Section 301 provisions allowed unilateral tariffs against Japanese practices deemed “unfair.” The 1989 Structural Impediments Initiative demanded that Japan open its keiretsu corporate networks, weaken retail protections, and reduce savings rates. Far from the invisible hand selecting winners, this was the calculated crippling of a technological rival. The period Wu credits to competitive markets required coordinated state intervention against foreign competitors.

Wu’s confidence in competitive markets reflects a core blindness of antitrust itself: It is designed primarily for domestic commercial disputes, not technologies that double as instruments of American empire. For Washington, concentrated platforms serve strategic purposes. The intelligence agencies can coordinate more easily with a small circle of entities for global surveillance, as FISA courts—the secret tribunals that authorize intelligence collection—can compel access to billions of users’ data through just a few orders. This system would strain under hundreds of independent providers, some likely lacking compliance infrastructure or willing to resist.

Concentration also streamlines the touchpoints that the national-security state must manage—indispensable when applying pressure to adversarial regimes. This capability proves decisive when hours matter. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Meta, Google, Apple, and Twitter swiftly restricted Russian state-funded media, an action that would have been unachievable at such speed with fragmented networks. Digital monopolies also transform sanctions into automatic exclusion. When Apple and Google remove Iranian banking apps from their stores, or AWS denies cloud services to sanctioned countries, the targets have few comparable alternatives, turning these companies into implementation mechanisms for US foreign policy. The architecture extends beyond formal sanctions. When WikiLeaks released classified diplomatic cables in 2010, Amazon booted it from its servers, Apple pulled its app, and PayPal cut financial access—all through implicit pressure rather than explicit instructions from the government.

Further, platform concentration channels foreign wealth into American markets. US platforms monopolize basic digital infrastructure—AWS and Azure for cloud computing, Apple and Google for mobile applications, Meta and Google for advertising, Stripe and PayPal for payment processing. This amounts to compulsory profit-sharing with Silicon Valley: Businesses worldwide must cut these platforms into their revenues simply to exist digitally, converting global corporate expenditures into American household wealth. Google and Meta dictate advertising rates from their position as both ad exchanges and audience aggregators—which means that foreign companies must pay American gatekeepers to reach customers in their own neighborhoods. Apple’s infrastructure control extracts twice, taking 15 to 30 percent from most digital app revenues—while engineering friction to preserve this take, despite court orders—and ensuring that users can’t escape without sacrificing years of their accumulated digital life.

The scale also enables labor arbitrage that competitive markets can’t coordinate: Apple mobilizes hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers at Foxconn for iPhone launches, paying local wages for products sold at American prices; Amazon’s Mechanical Turk atomizes complex tasks into micropayments, routing digital piecework to workers earning mere dollars per day; the world’s best engineers abandon regional tech hubs for Silicon Valley. These dynamics generate the mega-cap valuations that make tech stocks essential portfolio holdings, attracting global savings and boosting American retirement accounts.

The Age of Extraction rightly worries about Big Tech exploiting Americans, but it ignores how Americans exploit the world through Big Tech. Wu sees monopolistic platforms demanding regulatory correction; Washington sees strategic assets demanding geopolitical protection. When he calls for limiting platform power, he assumes that intrepid American entrepreneurs will rush to fill the void. But why would that vacuum remain American? Without US platform dominance, regional alternatives could flourish. Southeast Asia showed this is possible when Grab and Gojek captured markets from Uber. More troubling for the national-security establishment, Chinese platforms could seize the opening: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—which Beijing disciplines to serve state interests. Wu’s remedies presume purely domestic consequences, but they could ripple across the international system, eroding the economic and strategic advantages that currently underwrite the American-led order. It is hard to imagine Washington accepting that trade-off.

The Age of Extraction exemplifies this bind. It insists that competitive capitalism can deliver the emancipatory promise of the early Internet. But what if that promise—gift economies, collaborative commons, information flowing freely—was always incompatible with the market system it wants to preserve? Ultimately, an antitrust program shuffles market share but not market logic. It leaves the forces of capital intact, the structures of ownership unchanged, the imperatives of accumulation untouched. Antitrust might contribute to a transformative politics if fused with radical measures that remain far outside of this vision: the public ownership of digital infrastructure, the dissolution of the intellectual-property regime, free universal broadband. But severed from such demands, it simply determines which companies mine and monetize our digital activity, not whether the mining and monetizing continue. The real choice isn’t between monopoly and competition; it’s between recognizing platforms as extensions of the state and high finance, or pretending they’re merely businesses that grew too large. Big Tech should be relieved that its loudest critics have chosen the latter.