Timothy Crook observed that maybe the problem is not breaking up big platforms, but that the entire attentional competition market is cursed by toxic business models (manipulation, addiction). Breaking up platforms won't fix this if smaller platforms use the same toxic models.

Democratic policymakers and lawyers have fetishized 'truly neutral rules' in economic regulation, seeking rules that don't require any judgment, when the real issue is having values about how the economy should work and being willing to enforce those values.

Current internet (2025) is characterized by anger, outrage, and AI-generated content, representing a broken promise of what the technology was supposed to deliver.

Search results across Google, Amazon, and Spotify have become so filled with sponsored content that the speaker can no longer trust them as signals of quality, and this whole category of once-valuable search/ranking services has been 'shitified' through monetization.

Tim Wu's counterargument to Doctorow: platforms like Meta have actually been under competitive pressure from TikTok, stole features from TikTok and Snapchat, and improved as a result. Saying this isn't enshittification but rather the magic of competition.

Many pro-social apps designed to respect attention are built to compete with Instagram and TikTok but get out-competed and fail, suggesting that without being able to modify platforms themselves, alternatives cannot effectively compete.

The early internet felt better before Twitter and Facebook went algorithmic, around the heyday of blogging when individual bloggers could reach 40,000 hits per day.

There is growing consensus something went wrong with the internet somewhere along its development, but no consensus on what to do about it.

Giant tech platforms are increasingly spammed with ads and sponsored results, boost content designed to keep users hooked and angry, isolate and divide society, derange politics, and concentrate wealth among billionaires while relying on low-wage workers.

Producer perspective: some people, particularly young people and parents, actually find TikTok and Amazon to be valuable and functional, using them happily despite criticisms of these platforms.

Tim Wu argues that neoclassical economics assumes price is a method of discovering value, so if someone pays $70,000 for a pharmaceutical, that means they value it at $70,000 even if it seems extractive, but this ignores power dynamics and necessity rather than preference.

OpenAI's threat to Google's business model was what motivated Google to release LLMs publicly; without this competitive threat, Google might never have commercialized transformers and LLMs.

A neoclassical economist might argue that algorithmic price discrimination is efficient because it lets firms charge Ezra a higher price if he values kombucha higher and charge someone else lower based on their valuation, finding market-clearing prices and achieving economic utopia.

Terms-and-conditions capitalism, where regulatory burden is shifted to consumers to evaluate complex privacy policies and cookie choices, has failed to prevent surveillance and instead created an unlivable regulatory burden on users.

Only 7% of time spent on Instagram is spent on content from people you follow, with the remainder being algorithmic suggestions, representing the shift from showing users what they asked for to showing what Facebook calculates will keep them engaged longer.

Regulation should involve making values judgments about what kind of world we want, using metaphors like a gardener pruning species: some decisions prevent blight (monopoly prevention), some are aesthetic (native vs invasive species), some are for native/small business health. Not all regulatory decisions can or should be neutral.

Some surveillance and worker control practices (like facial recognition surveillance of workers) should be directly outlawed as policy decisions because we can collectively decide what kind of world we want, and other practices (like automated checkout) are harder to judge because there are real consumer benefits alongside worker harms.

Modern office culture prizes the illusion of productivity and looking busy: being at a desk or on work-related tasks looks productive, while taking walks or playing puzzle games looks like goofing off, even though the latter can be more restorative for actual productive capacity.

Modern workplace design—with constant email, Slack, and interruptions—is difficult to explain from an economic perspective because workplaces explicitly state they want creativity and deep work, yet structure themselves in ways proven to prevent it.

Klein challenges Mark's statement by noting that parental stress and burnout are the actual barriers: knowing you shouldn't be on your phone while your child asks for attention for the 17th time at 5:45 AM after a poor sleep doesn't change the behavior—the behavior only changes when overall well-being is better (sleep, work boundaries, recovery).