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The company that runs the physical wires into your home also controls how fast the data can move through them, and it has every incentive to make the speed depend on which sites you visit and how much you pay. That’s not a technical accident. It’s a business model that was briefly illegal, and then […]
Read the case →One company owns the ticketing platform, the venue contracts, the resale marketplace, and, according to a federal antitrust case, the whole rigged game in between. That’s why the same show can sell out in minutes and appear on a resale site for ten times face value, and why the person selling it to you at […]
Read the case →There’s one button on every Amazon product page that matters more than all the others: the Buy Box, the yellow “Add to Cart” that decides where your money goes. Amazon controls who gets it, and it has decided, in its own words, that the price it wants beats the price you want. The box that […]
Read the case →In the summer of 2011, Coca-Cola quietly complained to the London Metal Exchange. Not about the price of aluminum futures – there was plenty of metal sitting around. The problem was getting any of it out. The queue to pull aluminum out of a Detroit warehouse had stretched to six months or more. “It takes […]
Read the case →The problem isn’t that you shopped wrong. It’s that Amazon made the cheapest price on the internet illegal for anyone but Amazon to offer. The clause you’ve never heard of Somewhere in the terms you clicked past, Amazon binds every seller on its marketplace to something it calls a most-favored-nation deal. In plain English it […]
Read the case →Google and Meta signed a secret agreement to stop competing in online ads — giving one preferential auction access while the other shelved the tech that threatened them both.
Read the case →Google didn’t accidentally ruin search. It ran a code, got scared, and made a business decision to make search worse – because worse search prints money. There’s a moment in the surfaced Department of Justice documents where Ben Gomes – the man who actually ran Google Search – says the quiet part out loud. “I’m […]
Read the case →In late 2024 and early 2025 Americans paid record prices for a dozen eggs — $6 and up, with empty shelves, buying limits, and restaurant surcharges. The story you were told was bird flu. The fuller story is a cartelized market that used a crisis as cover. This is the enshittification of the American breakfast. […]
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