[...] search services, social and not, are “must-have” properties for advertisers as well as users. As such, they have made very deep inroads indeed into the sphere of cultural, economic, and political influence that was once dominated by broadcast networks, radio stations, and newspapers. But their dominance is so complete, and their technology so complex, that they have escaped pressures for transparency and accountability that kept traditional media answerable to the public

We pay no money for Google’s services. But someone pays for its thousands of engineers, and that someone is advertisers. Nearly all the company’s revenue comes from marketers eager to reach the targeted audiences that Google delivers so abundantly. We pay with our attention and with our data, the raw material of marketing. [...]

The question now is whether regulators will adopt and enforce classic rules in a digital age, or let them wither into desuetude

[...] Google continues to maintain that it doesn’t want human judgment blurring the autonomy of its algorithms. But even spelling suggestions depend on human judgment, and in fact Google developed that feature not only by means of algorithms, but also through a painstaking, iterative interplay between computer science experts and human beta testers who report on their satisfaction with various results configurations.[...]

[...] 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.