How Big Tech Weaponized the Internet and How to Fix It | Tim Wu

February 16, 2026·47 min·2 clips

Tim Wu names June 11, 2013 as the exact day the internet died — and blames government incompetence for letting it happen.

The premise is blunt. Kofinas introduces Wu as a Columbia Law School professor of law, science, and technology, an author, and a former White House special assistant for technology and competition policy. From there, the episode treats platform power as an economic event with ugly spillover into politics, media, housing, and healthcare. Wu starts with function. A platform does more than match a buyer with a seller. It can create enough trust, through reviews, testimonials, and other signals, for strangers to do business. That is the hopeful version. A good platform lets more people, entities, and firms enter a market without building the whole distribution machine themselves. Smaller actors can find demand without owning a record label, a distribution company, or a vertically integrated operation. The history gives the argument some bite. Wu moves from ancient markets to eBay and Amazon, arguing that the technology changes but the access question keeps coming back. Design is where the fight sits. A neutral platform can open a market. A platform locked to one technical moment can age badly. Minitel, the French predecessor to the internet, is the cautionary case: early, useful, and then stuck to the technologies of the nineties. The fix, as Wu frames it, is architectural. Platforms need to help change happen instead of freezing users and producers into one technical order. Kofinas keeps pressing the harder question: what would it take to take back control of the internet and build an economy that works for more than the people already at the top? The public hour ends by sending the rest of the Tim Wu conversation to the premium feed, with the second hour set up cleanly.

As heard by us

A clear, systems-level look at how platform power turned internet openness into a problem of economic control.

Hidden Forces puts platform power at the center of the internet economy, with Tim Wu drawing on his Columbia Law work, writing on technology and power, and White House competition-policy experience.

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Why you'd press play

If you have ever felt the internet quietly turned against you, Tim Wu has the receipts.

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