“The most important unit of power in a democracy should be the citizen. Not the corporation.”

— Tim Wu^[1]

A Political Economy of Monopolized Minds

In the concurrent digital age, attention is no longer a human faculty; it has become an economic resource, a commodity, and increasingly a form of currency. The attention economy is marked by asymmetries of power, with a small handful of dominant firms controlling the architecture through which information, discourse, and desire circulate. This monopolization of attention, explored in depth in part one of this series, does more than distort consumer choice. It poses structural risks to competition, democratic deliberation, and the integrity of civic life itself.

Part one, The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy, traced the psychological, and sociotechnical dimensions of the attention economy.^[2] It demonstrated how algorithmic systems exploit cognitive vulnerabilities, undermine autonomy, and impair the capacity for democratic deliberation. It situated the crisis of attention within a broader debate of digital distraction, surveillance capitalism, and the commodification of human cognition, arguing that the decline of cognitive autonomy represents not just a personal or cultural concern, but a structural threat to democracy.

This piece, a follow-up to the last, shifts gears toward the political economy and corporate architecture around the attention economy. It argues that the central crisis is not merely the extraction of time or the manipulation of emotions: it is structural. The concentration of attention within a handful of platforms such as Meta, Google, and Amazon creates monopolistic attitudes that shape the behavior of users, competitors, and even sovereign governments. These companies don’t just host content; they shape its visibility, financial viability, and circulation. Along the way, they’ve created walled gardens protected by algorithmic secrecy, competition-threatening mergers, and a knot of legal and contractual protections that choke off innovation and lock in users.

We examine this crisis through three interrelated lenses: first, how attention monopolies operate and entrench their dominance through platform design, surveillance-based business models, and exclusionary tactics; second, how this structure connects to classical and contemporary economic thinking on competition; and finally, how reformists have reimagined antitrust for the digital age to rein in platform dominance and restore democratic oversight over attention markets.

Monopoly by Design

If monopoly in the industrial age was defined by control over production or distribution, digital monopolies control the scarce cognitive bandwidth of billions. This control is achieved not through traditional price-fixing or supply manipulation, but through what economist Thomas Philippon, author of The Great Reversal, calls “cheap exclusion”: the use of behavioral algorithms, vertical integration, and data hoarding to prevent entry and foreclose competition.^[3]

At the heart of the problem is an outdated antitrust framework that remains fixated on price effects, often missing the ways in which firms in the attention economy extract value. The “consumer welfare standard,” championed by the Chicago School and entrenched in U.S. antitrust enforcement since the 1980s, evaluates harm primarily through price increases or output restrictions.^[4] Yet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon often offer services for “free,” monetizing instead through surveillance advertising and the commodification of user attention. This creates what legal scholar and former-FTC Chair Lina Khan calls a blind spot: a regulatory framework built for tangible goods, ill-equipped to confront platform power.^[5]

As Khan demonstrated in her influential 2017 article Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, Amazon strengthened its dominance in e-commerce by presenting itself as relentlessly pro-consumer, offering low prices, fast shipping, and a smooth user experience. While these effects do benefit consumers, they also distract from Amazon’s engagement in aggressive practices including using data from third-party sellers to launch competing products, prioritizing its own listings in search results, and vertically integrating into logistics and cloud services in ways that limited competition.^[6]

The blind spot around price becomes even more perilous in the realm of attentional markets, where value is extracted not at the point of sale, but at the point of cognitive capture. Leading technology firms like Meta, Google, Amazon, compete not just for market share, but for user time, behavior, and visibility. And yet, traditional antitrust tools remain poorly equipped to assess harms in these markets, where the primary good exchange is mental real estate, not money.

Google: Default by Design

As confirmed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust suit and Judge Amit Mehta’s 2024 ruling, Google’s monopoly was not the inevitable outcome of superior innovation. Rather, it was engineered through billions in payments to device manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to secure its default status on phones and browsers.^[7]

In 2021 alone, Google paid more than $26 billion to maintain these default positions, effectively locking out competitors and making search access a toll booth guarded by exclusivity contracts. This is monopoly by design, not merit. It reflects what Philippon warns is the shift from productive innovation to rent-seeking behavior, where dominant firms use their market position to preserve power rather than improve service.

These practices are reminiscent of Microsoft’s antitrust violations in the early 2000s where they forced Internet Explorer onto Windows devices. But today, the stakes are higher. The digital feedback loop (more users = more data = better algorithms = more users) creates self-reinforcing dominance. The more users Google captures, the more data it collects to refine its predictive systems, which in turn improves performance and attracts even more users. The outcome is not only economic inefficiency, but what we might call epistemic capture: the shaping of what is visible, credible, and clickable, through strategic control and benefiting from the lack of nuance in the antitrust infrastructure.^[8]

Facebook: The Prison of Network Effects

Facebook’s grip operates through a different, but equally insidious, logic: network effects and switching costs.  Cory Doctorow, a renowned technology journalist, digital rights activist, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argued in his Electronic Frontier Foundation paper Interoperable Facebook, users are not addicted: they are trapped. Quitting Facebook means losing your community, your photos, your business presence such that social capital that is non-transferrable due to Facebook’s refusal to support interoperability.^[9]

These frictions are not technical inevitabilities; they are deliberately designed barriers. Facebook’s refusal to allow third-party platforms access to its messaging and social graph is reinforced through legal and contractual thickets, ranging from Section 1201 of the DMCA to non-negotiable terms of service, that prevent competitors from offering interoperable alternatives.

The result is what Doctorow calls “hostage taking.” Users stay not because Facebook is good, but because leaving means starting from zero in a system built to punish exit. This is platform lock-in masquerading as user loyalty.

Moreover, Facebook’s entrenchment was proactively expanded through a pattern of anti-competitive acquisitions. The FTC’s 2020 lawsuit revealed how Facebook purchased emergent competitors like Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014) not for synergy or innovation, but to “neutralize potential threats,” as internal emails from Mark Zuckerberg made chillingly explicit. This kind of consolidation where rival firms are acquired not to enhance but to extinguish competition, reflects precisely the kind of behavior European regulators are quicker to block. As Philippon points out, U.S. regulators have allowed market concentration to balloon, even as Europe has taken a more muscular stance.^[10]

A Cyclo-Structural Crisis

The common thread in these examples is that digital monopolies thrive not by improving consumer outcomes, but by designing architectures of exclusion. Whether it is Google’s default positioning, Amazon’s data-driven vertical integration, or Facebook’s acquisition-fueled dominance, the outcome is the same: a shrinking competitive field, mounting behavioral control, and a political economy that rewards dominance over dynamism.

This is the “curse of bigness” that Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and former White House advisor, warns about. In The Curse of Bigness, Wu argues that modern antitrust must return to its political origins: protecting not just prices, but democracy and agency. In the attention economy, where a few platforms mediate what billions see, share, and believe, this return is not optional: it is existential.^[11]

Monopoly as Market Failure

Economist Thomas Philippon argues in The Great Reversal, the United States has, over the past two decades, gone from being one of the most competitive large economies in the world to one of the most monopolized. His data-driven critique reveals a sobering reversal: American markets are now less efficient, less dynamic, and more extractive than their European counterparts.

In his critique of the American economy, Philippon is particularly observant of the structural trends shaping the digital attention economy. He claims that if traditional monopolies extract economic rents by raising prices or restricting output, attention monopolies extract what we might call “behavioral rents” such that they manipulate user behavior, suppress rival entry, and dominate the flows of visibility, time, and communication. These markets are characterized not by productivity, but by strategic obstruction, also known as cheap exclusion. This manifests in several ways: algorithmic gatekeeping that controls what information users see; legal and contractual barriers that prevent interoperability with competing services; and business models designed not to enhance product quality, but to maximize influence and behavioral control over users.

This pattern is not theoretical. The FTC’s 2020 antitrust lawsuit against Facebook (now Meta) revealed how the company pursued a deliberate strategy of market foreclosure. Internal communications showed that when faced with potential competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg chose acquisition over innovation, writing explicitly that “it is better to buy than compete.” The FTC argued that these purchases were not merely business expansions, but tactical moves to “neutralize threats,” consolidate data control, and foreclose interoperability. Facebook also imposed discriminatory restrictions on access to its Graph API, blocking or throttling developers who built competing apps or refused to hand over user data, thereby turning platform governance into a tool of anticompetitive enforcement.

The absence of meaningful alternatives isn’t the result of natural market evolution but of deliberate design choices meant to enforce lock-in. By lobbying for and utilizing legal restrictions like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and Terms of Service contracts, dominant platforms have systematically undermined interoperability. As a result, users face high switching costs, not because of brand loyalty or superior service, but because leaving means abandoning one’s social graph, content history, and visibility.

Meanwhile, Amazon similarly exploits attention and visibility to entrench dominance. As Lina Khan showed in Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, the company surveils third-party sellers on its marketplace, appropriates their data, and uses it to create its own private-label products to undercut rivals while steering user attention through algorithmic preference. This is not merely a violation of marketplace neutrality; it is a sophisticated form of attention arbitrage, in which user engagement is harvested and redirected toward Amazon’s commercial interests.

Across these platforms, the guise of abundance in the form of more products, more information, more choice protects the real ambition of concentration of power. Philippon warns that this is the mark of market failure in the modern U.S. economy: competition is not lost because firms out-innovate each other, but because industry leaders mold markets so that they cannot lose.

The Remedy

The diagnosis is clear. What remains contested is the remedy.

Tim Wu, in The Curse of Bigness, contends that the modern antitrust movement has drifted dangerously far from its original mission. Where once antitrust sought to protect the political and social fabric of democracy from the encroachment of private monopolies, the post-1980s Chicago School narrowed its focus almost exclusively to short-term consumer welfare, typically measured by price effects. In Wu’s view, this minimalist interpretation is ill-suited to address 21st-century platform dominance, particularly in sectors like social media, search, and e-commerce where users often pay not in money but in time, data, and autonomy.

Wu calls for a “neo-Brandeisian” revival of antitrust that explicitly considers power, gatekeeping, and long-term democratic risk. He advocates firstly for structural separation of dominant firms, particularly those that vertically integrate and use their infrastructure to prefer their own services (e.g. Amazon favoring its in-house brands in search rankings). Secondly, there must be limits on data accumulation, recognizing that the control of behavioral data can entrench incumbency and create barriers for competitors. Thirdly, he calls for presumptive bans on mergers by dominant firms, reversing the burden of proof in cases where monopolists attempt to acquire emerging rivals, which was highly relevant in Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp.

Most importantly for the attention economy, there is a pressing need to treat algorithmic governance as a central concern in antitrust enforcement. If platforms are no longer passive intermediaries but active architects of digital experience in terms of what content is seen, when, and by whom, then their design choices must be recognized as exercises of economic and informational power. As established in the preceding piece, The Attention Economy and the Collapse of Cognitive Autonomy, algorithmic systems are optimized not for truth, deliberation, or civic well-being, but for engagement metrics that correlate with outrage, sensationalism, and emotional volatility. In this light, the mechanisms of ranking and recommendation cannot be viewed as neutral or purely technical. They are infrastructural decisions that influence public discourse, distort informational ecosystems, and entrench dominant firms by making visibility itself a scarce and unevenly distributed resource.

This is not simply a design problem: it is a form of market control. Just as monopolists in traditional markets can restrict access to physical goods or services, digital platforms can restrict access to attention, manipulating the visibility of content and the discoverability of competitors. In doing so, they construct a kind of cognitive tollgate: one must play by the platform’s opaque rules to be seen, heard, or remembered. These algorithmic architectures, while framed as tools for personalization, are in fact mechanisms of influence that consolidate power over public attention and threaten pluralism.

Lina Khan, former-Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, shares this vision but adds legal and institutional tools to the picture. Her 2017 Yale Law Journal article, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” argues that antitrust must account for platform firms that use predatory pricing, cross-subsidization, and data-driven foreclosure not to benefit consumers in the long term, but to eliminate competitors before they become viable threats. Khan advocates for a reinvigorated approach to merger enforcement, particularly targeting “killer acquisitions” and data-motivated takeovers in the tech sector. She calls for antitrust analysis that moves beyond narrow price metrics to include concerns such as innovation suppression, barriers to market access, and threats to democratic accountability. Her proposals also include granting the FTC broader rulemaking powers to set clear standards for fair competition in digital markets, such as mandating platform neutrality, and restoring the political economy dimension of antitrust by recognizing that monopolistic firms can distort not only economic outcomes, but also labor conditions, media diversity, and the foundations of public discourse.

Democratic Stakes of Platform Power

Beyond structural reform, there needs to be a call for radical transparency. Over time it has become clearer that in the attention economy, market outcomes are not visible in prices. Consumer welfare is dictated by algorithms, recommendation systems, and ranking criteria. These invisible forces are the underlying architectures that determine which voices are amplified, which products are shown, and which ideas are surfaced.

Wu proposes a regime of algorithmic audits, where firms are required to disclose how their systems work, who they benefit, and what biases they embed. This would allow regulators, researchers, and civil society to assess whether these systems serve the public interest or merely corporate ones. Transparency could also deter exploitative behavior by exposing the correlation between algorithmic design and political polarization, misinformation, or harmful content amplification.

As the first essay argued, when platforms exploit affective triggers and engineer compulsive engagement, they corrode not just user well-being, but the mental conditions necessary for civic participation. This strikes at the heart of cognitive autonomy: the ability to think freely, evaluate information critically, and participate meaningfully in democratic life. In such a landscape, attention is not just a commodity. Its monopolization thus represents a democratic deficit, where the algorithmic curation of speech, information, and emotion constrains what citizens can imagine, question, or choose.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this essay builds on the philosophical and normative claims of the first to argue that the attention economy’s crisis is not just individual but structural and political. To preserve democracy in the digital age, we must challenge not only what platforms do, but what they are allowed to be. As we confront the monopolization of minds, the defense of competition must be understood as inseparable from the defense of cognitive liberty. Without cognitive autonomy, democratic agency withers.

 

 

 

^[1] Wu, T. (2018). The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. Columbia Global Reports.

^[2] Denny Center for Democratic Capitalism, The Attention Economy, Georgetown University Law Center, https://www.law.georgetown.edu/denny-center/blog/the-attention-economy/ .

^[3] Khan, L. M. (2017). Amazon’s antitrust paradox. Yale Law Journal, 126(3), 710–805. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

^[4] Philippon, T. (2019). The Great Reversal: How America gave up on free markets. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

^[5] U.S. Department of Justice. (2020, October 20). Justice Department Sues Monopolist Google for Violating Antitrust Laws. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws

^[6] Mehta, A. (2024). United States v. Google LLC: Memorandum Opinion. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/district-of-columbia/dcdce/1:2020cv03010/223205/626/

^[7] Federal Trade Commission. (2020, December 9). FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization

^[8] Doctorow, C. (2021). Interoperable Facebook: Why the Social Network Needs an Open Standard. Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/interoperable-facebook

^[9] Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

^[10] Wu, T. (2017). The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Vintage Books.

^[11] Stucke, M. E., & Ezrachi, A. (2016). Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy. Harvard University Press.