According to Fortune, Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu – who previously served in the Biden administration and was described by The New York Times as “an architect of Biden’s antitrust policy” – argues in his new book that American capitalism has devolved into an “age of extraction.” Wu connects current political volatility to widespread feelings that “our system is not fair,” suggesting people feel “out-powered, as opposed to out-competed.” He points to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ recent World Series win with baseball’s biggest payroll ever as an example of distorted markets, while holding up the NFL’s competitive balance as a better model. Wu, who coined “net neutrality” over 20 years ago and wrote about “the attention economy” a decade back, says we’ve “let things go a little too far” from the American tradition of broad-based wealth.
The extraction economy is making everything worse
Here’s the thing: Wu’s argument basically comes down to a fundamental shift in business philosophy. Instead of competing to make better products, companies now focus on accumulating market power and then extracting as much value as possible from customers and workers. And we’ve all felt this – that “weird feeling of something you like becoming worse” while prices keep going up.
I think he’s absolutely right about this. Look at streaming services constantly raising prices while cutting content, or software that used to be sold outright now becoming subscription nightmares. It’s not just tech either – Wu argues this is economy-wide. The problem? A “lack of discipline” where companies face weak competition and can get away with making their products worse while charging more.
The NFL as an unlikely capitalist hero
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Wu, as a sports fan, points to the National Football League as a surprisingly effective model for how markets should work. The NFL has “aggressive rebalancing” through mechanisms like the salary cap, draft system, and adjusted schedules. This means even small-market teams like Kansas City can dominate while traditional powerhouses like New York struggle.
Compare that to Major League Baseball, where the Los Angeles Dodgers just won back-to-back World Series with the biggest payroll in baseball history. That’s extraction in action – resources matter more than merit. The NFL model proves you can have fierce competition while maintaining fairness. Why can’t our economy work more like that?
Wu’s been right before
We should probably take Wu seriously because he’s got a track record of spotting trends early. He literally invented the term “net neutrality” over twenty years ago, and that concept is still law today. Then about a decade back, he wrote The Attention Merchants warning about how our attention was becoming a commodity – and look where we are now with social media and endless scrolling.
He told Fortune he wants to be humble about it, but come on – he basically predicted the attention economy mess we’re drowning in. “Companies are very sophisticated at essentially harvesting this resource from us at a very low price,” he said. And as a parent of 9 and 12 year olds, he’s seeing people become “much more sensitive” about their kids using attention-economy products.
The political reality check
So why hasn’t more been done about these problems? Wu got real about his time in the Biden White House, saying it was “impossible to get a vote on anything, any issue.” He specifically mentioned children’s privacy legislation that he thinks 99% of Americans would support, but Congress “doesn’t want to let things get to a vote.”
The reason? “Influence of big tech over politics has just gotten so strong.” That’s the brutal truth. We’re stuck in this cycle where extraction begets political power which enables more extraction. Wu’s new book frames this as the “extractors” versus the “extracted” – sound familiar? It’s basically the K-shaped economy we keep hearing about.
But here’s the hopeful part: Wu says he’s “not a socialist” and wants to “return capitalism to what it can be.” He sees himself in the tradition of Louis Brandeis, the Progressive Era justice who helped develop modern antitrust law. The solution isn’t destroying business – it’s restoring discipline and fair rules. Basically, we need to make the whole economy work more like the NFL. And given how much Americans love football, that might actually be a message people can understand.
