Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who coined the term 'net neutrality' and served as a White House technology and competition adviser in the Biden administration, argues that the internet has been reshaped over the past two decades from an open commons into a system organized around the extraction of value from users by a small number of dominant platforms. The book traces how 1990s techno-utopianism gave way to the consolidation of Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and a handful of others, and how those companies—through targeted advertising, algorithmic content distribution, and aggressive acquisitions—now structure attention, information, commerce, and political life on terms that benefit themselves and their investors. Wu connects this story to his earlier work in The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, but presses further into the political consequences: the erosion of independent journalism, the destabilization of democracy, the rise of authoritarian movements that exploit platform dynamics. He also argues that the same dynamics threaten the next wave of AI, where extractive logic risks foreclosing more open alternatives. Wu is a careful lawyer, and the book contains specific policy prescriptions—antitrust enforcement, interoperability mandates, structural separations—aimed at restoring an internet that serves users rather than mines them. Named a New Yorker Best Book of 2025.