[...] we can’t hope to reform the information economy without fundamentally changing the incentives at its core. Wu’s postmaterialism would have been a good fit for the roaring nineties, when a rising tide of Internet firm profits seemed to be lifting many parts of the economy. But the economic crisis that has overtaken the United States since 2008 makes our time in many ways more similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s era than Bill Clinton’s. A small cadre of the lucky, the talented, and the ruthless are taking an enormous share of the revenues generated by new Internet technologies. They keep their methods strictly proprietary while reaping huge returns from content put out in the open by others. Like the megafirms and CEOs that the New Deal helped bring to heel, the leaders of our largest tech firms have been very quick to misequate personal enrichment with the public good.