The Myth of the Unwanted Internet
In a recent podcast, New York Times journalist Ezra Klein hosted lawyer Tim Wu and writer Cory Doctorow for a conversation titled “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet.” They ran through a familiar bill of indictment against the modern internet: surveillance, manipulation, algorithmic pricing, the squeezing of creators, spam, fraud, and the dehumanization of work. It was an engaging discussion among three thoughtful people. It was also, in important respects, wrong.
I don’t claim expertise across every issue they covered—and, unlike them, I won’t pretend otherwise. But I have spent considerable time studying the evolution of online consumer protection: how trust emerged in a radically new environment, how entrepreneurs built the mechanisms that made online commerce possible, and how those mechanisms continue to evolve in response to AI. On those questions, the Klein-Wu-Doctorow narrative gets the story—and its causes—wrong.