Don't Be Evil

by Rana Foroohar

  39. Ben Casselman and Conor Dougherty, “As Investors Flip Housing Markets, Home Buyers Are Reeling,” The New York Times, June 21, 2019.

  40. Terje, “AI Could Add $6 Trillion to the Global Economy,” Feelingstream, May 29, 2018.

  41. Tim Wu, “In the Grip of the New Monopolists,” The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2010.

  42. David Z. Morris, “Netflix Is Expected to Spend Up to $13 Billion on Original Programming This Year,” Fortune, July 8, 2018.

  43. “Amazon’s Cloud Will Connect Volkswagen’s Vast Factory Network,” 69News, WFMZ, March 27, 2019.

  44. Angela Chen, “Amazon’s Alexa Now Handles Patient Health Information,” The Verge, April 4, 2019.

  45. Bloomberg Billionaires Index, accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/​billionaires.

  46. Lance Whitney, “Apple, Google, Others Settle Antipoaching Lawsuit for $415 Million,” https://www.cnet.com/​news/​apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/.

  47. Leigh Buchanan, “American Entrepreneurship Is Actually Vanishing. Here’s Why,” Inc., May 2015.

  48. The Hamilton Project, “Start-up Rates Are Declining Across All Sectors,” accessed May 9, 2019, http://www.hamiltonproject.org/​charts/​start_up_rates_are_declining_across_all_sectors.

  49. Ian Hathaway and Robert E. Litan, “Declining Business Dynamism in the United States: A Look at States and Metros,” Brookings Institution, May 5, 2014.

  50. Derek Thompson, “America’s Monopoly Problem,” The Atlantic, October 2016.

  51. Kara Swisher, “Is This the End of the Age of Apple?” The New York Times, January 3, 2019.

  52. Lina M. Khan, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Yale Law Journal 126, no. 3 (January 2017).

  53. Robert Shapiro and Siddhartha Aneja, “Who Owns Americans’ Personal Information and What Is It Worth?” Future Majority, March 8, 2019.

  54. Foroohar, “Big Tech Must Pay for Access to America’s ‘Digital Oil.’ ”

  55. Colby Smith, “Peak Buybacks?” Financial Times, November 7, 2018.

  56. Nico Grant and Ian King, “Big Tech’s Big Tax Ruse: Industry Splurges on Buybacks Not Jobs,” Bloomberg, April 14, 2019.

  57. According to data compiled by the government relations firm Mehlman, Castagnetti, 2019.

  58. Cade Metz, “Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users,” Wired, September 15, 2015.

  59. Alistair Gray, “US Retailers Shut Up Shop as Amazon’s March Continues,” Financial Times, March 8, 2019.

  60. James Manyika et al., “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: What the Future of Work Will Mean for Jobs, Skills, and Wages,” McKinsey and Company, November 2017.

  61. “Mapping Inequalities Across the On-Demand Economy,” Data and Society, accessed May 9, 2019, https://datasociety.net/​initiatives/​future-of-labor/​mapping-inequalities-across-the-on-demand-economy/.

  62. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, April 17, 2015.

  63. Wikipedia, s.v. “The Great Transformation,” last modified March 29, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​The_Great_Transformation_(book).

  64. Zuboff, “Big Other,” 80.

  65. Michael Winnick, “Putting a Finger on Our Phone Obsession,” June 16, 2016, https://blog.dscout.com/​mobile-touches.

  66. Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2014), 1.

  67. Rana Foroohar, “All I Want for Christmas Is a Digital Detox,” Financial Times, December 22, 2017.

  68. Rana Foroohar, “Vivienne Ming: ‘The Professional Class Is About to Be Blindsided by AI,” Financial Times, July 27, 2018.

  69. Sam Levin, “Facebook Told Advertisers It Can Identify Teens Feeling ‘Insecure’ and ‘Worthless,’ ” The Guardian, May 1, 2017.

  70. Foroohar, “All I Want for Christmas Is a Digital Detox.”

  71. Emily Bary, “Apple Never Meant for You to Spend So Much Time on Your Phone, Tim Cook Says,” MarketWatch, June 27, 2019.

  72. Olivia Solon, “Ex-Facebook President Sean Parker: Site Made to Exploit Human ‘Vulnerability,’ ” The Guardian, November 9, 2017.

  Chapter 2: The Valley of the Kings

  1. Rana Foroohar and Edward Luce, “Privacy as a Competitive Advantage,” Financial Times, October 16, 2017.

  2. Search Engine Market Share, Statcounter, accessed May 9, 2019, http://gs.statcounter.com/​search-engine-market-share/​all/​worldwide/​2009.

  3. Rana Foroohar, “Facebook Has Put Growth Ahead of Governance for Too Long,” Financial Times, December 23, 2018.

  4. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005), 54.

  5. Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (New York: Penguin, 2019), 144.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Sheera Frenkel et al., “Delay, Deny, and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis,” The New York Times, November 14, 2018.

  8. Tasneem Nashrulla, “A Top George Soros Aide Called for an Independent Investigation of Facebook’s Lobbying and PR,” BuzzFeed News, November 15, 2018.

  9. Jeff Bercovici, “Peter Thiel Wants You to Get Angry About Death,” Inc., July 7, 2015; Tad Friend, “Silicon Valley’s Quest to Live Forever,” The New Yorker, March 27, 2017.

  10. Marco della Cava et al., “Uber’s Kalanick Faces Crisis over ‘Baller’ Culture,” USA Today, February 24, 2017.

  11. Jeff Bezos, “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker,” Medium, February 7, 2019.

  12. Daisuke Wakabayashi and Katie Benner, “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android,’ ” The New York Times, October 25, 2018.

  13. Aarian Marshall, “Elon Musk Reveals His Awkward Dislike of Mass Transit,” Wired, December 14, 2017.

  14. Levy, In the Plex, 121.

  15. Levy, In the Plex, 13.

  16. Ken Auletta, “The Search Party,” The New Yorker, January 6, 2008.

  17. Rana Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip on Money and Power,” Financial Times, July 3, 2017.

  18. Rana Foroohar, “Big Tech Can No Longer Be Allowed to Police Itself,” Financial Times, August 27, 2017.

  Chapter 3: Advertising and Its Discontents

  1. Scott Shane, “These Are the Ads Russia Bought on Facebook in 2016,” The New York Times, November 1, 2017; Cecilia Kang et al., “Russia-Financed Ad Linked Clinton and Satan,” The New York Times, November 1, 2017.

  2. Indictment, United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.justice.gov/​file/​1035477/​download.

  3. Author reporting with Guillaume Chaslot.

  4. Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, “On YouTube’s Digital Playground, a Gate Left Wide Open for Pedophiles,” The New York Times, June 4, 2019, page A8.

  5. Rob Copeland, “YouTube Weighs Major Changes to Kids’ Content Amid FTC Probe,” The Wall Street Journal, June 19, 2019.

  6. Tim Wu, “Aspen Ideas Festival: ‘Is the First Amendment Obsolete?’ ” June 2018.

  7. Zeynep Tufekci, “Russian Meddling Is a Symptom, Not the Disease,” The New York Times, October 3, 2018.

  8. Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Knopf, 2016).

  9. Craig Silverman, “Apps Installed on Millions of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior to Execute a Multimillion-Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme,” BuzzFeed News, October 23, 2018.

  10. Rana Foroohar, “Big Tech’s Unhealthy Obsession with Hyper-Targeted Ads,” Financial Times, October 28, 2018; Mark Warner to FTC on Goo
gle Digital Ad Fraud, accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.scribd.com/​document/​391603927/​Senator-Warner-Letter-to-FTC-on-Google-Digital-Ad-Fraud.

  11. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 31.

  12. John F. Wasik, “Why Elon Musk Named His Electric Car Tesla,” The Seattle Times, December 31, 2017.

  13. Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 1998.

  14. Adam Fisher, “ ‘Google Was Not a Normal Place’: Brin, Page and Mayer on the Accidental Birth of the Company That Changed Everything,” Vanity Fair, July 10, 2018.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Levy, In the Plex, 26.

  17. Fisher, “ ‘Google Was Not a Normal Place.’ ”

  18. Ken Auletta, “Searching for Trouble,” The New Yorker, October 12, 2009.

  19. Levy, In the Plex, 133.

  20. Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (as Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) (New York: Twelve, 2018).

  21. William H. Janeway, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 313.

  22. Levy, In the Plex, 45.

  23. Big Easy PowerPoint presentation.

  24. Fisher, “ ‘Google Was Not a Normal Place.’ ”

  25. Levy, In the Plex, 87.

  26. Ibid., 88.

  27. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005), 113–14.

  28. David Vise, The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time (New York, Bantam Dell, 2005), 84–85.

  29. Fisher, “ ‘Google Was Not a Normal Place.’ ”

  30. Battelle, The Search, 125.

  Chapter 4: Party Like It’s 1999

  1. Joshua Cooper Ramo, “Jeffrey Preston Bezos, 1999 Person of the Year,” Time, December 27, 1999.

  2. Wikipedia, graphic of dot-com bubble, accessed May 9, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Dot-com_bubble#/​media/​File:Nasdaq_Composite_dot-com_bubble.svg.

  3. Simon Dumenco, “Touby Prize,” New York, July 20, 2007.

  4. Rana Foroohar, “Europe’s Got Net Fever,” Newsweek International, September 5, 1999.

  5. Ibid.

  6. “Dotcom Darlings: Where Are They Now?” The Telegraph, accessed May 9, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/​finance/​8354329/​Dotcom-darlings-where-are-they-now.html/.

  7. John Casey, “Accidental Millionaires Sell First Tuesday,” The Guardian, July 21, 2000.

  8. Simon Goodley, “Betfair Buy Spells the Final Flutter,” The Daily Telegraph, December 22, 2001.

  9. Richard Fletcher, “Antfactory Is Wound Up by Shareholders,” The Daily Telegraph, September 30, 2001.

  10. Hal R. Varian, “Economic Scene: Comparing Nasdaq and Tulips Unfair to Flowers,” The New York Times, February 8, 2001.

  11. Olson, Rise and Decline of Nations.

  12. Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street (New York: Crown Business, 2016), 130.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Wikipedia, s.v. “Dot-com bubble,” last modified May 22, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Dot-com_bubble.

  16. Melanie Warner, “The Beauty of Hype: A Cautionary Tale,” Fortune, March 1, 1999.

  17. Rana Foroohar, “Flight of the Dot-Coms,” Newsweek International, July 15, 2001.

  18. Rana Foroohar and Stefan Theil, “The Dot-Com Witch Hunt,” Newsweek International, September 3, 2001.

  19. Nicole Friedman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Hedge Fund Investor Charles Murphy Dies in Apparent Suicide,” The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2017.

  20. Rana Foroohar, “Money, Money, Money: Silicon Valley Speculation Recalls Dotcom Mania,” Financial Times, July 17, 2017.

  21. Pan Kwan Yuk and Shannon Bond, “Netflix Returns to Market with $2bn Junk Bond Offering,” Financial Times, October 22, 2018.

  22. Rob Copeland and Eliot Brown, “Palantir Has a $20 Billion Valuation and a Bigger Problem: It Keeps Losing Money,” The Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2018.

  23. Foroohar, “Money, Money, Money.”

  24. Rana Foroohar, “Another Tech Bubble Could Be About to Burst,” Financial Times, January 27, 2019.

  Chapter 5: Darkness Rises

  1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

  2. Dan Levine, “Apple, Google Settle Smartphone Patent Litigation,” Reuters, May 16, 2014.

  3. Shanthi Rexaline, “10 Years of Android: How the Operating System Reached 86% Market Share,” MSN News, September 25, 2018.

  4. Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, “The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition from Startups,” The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017.

  5. Josh Constine, “Facebook Pays Teens to Install VPN That Spies on Them,” TechCrunch, January 29, 2019.

  6. Levy, Auletta, and Isaacson all outlined the Apple-Android battle in detail.

  7. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 237–38.

  8. Ibid., 80–81.

  9. Author interview.

  10. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 101.

  11. Ibid., 63.

  12. In a January 2019 interview with Google’s chief counsel, Kent Walker, who came on board the company in 2006, he said that Google hadn’t begun to think about issues like antitrust until 2008.

  13. Rana Foroohar, “Big Tech vs. Big Pharma: The Battle Over US Patent Protection,” Financial Times, October 16, 2017.

  14. In a January 2019 interview with me, Google’s chief counsel, Kent Walker, reiterated the patent troll narrative and said he felt the changes to the U.S. patent system had “left us in a better place with a stronger, more robust, more resilient patent system.”

  15. B. Zorina Khan, “Trolls and Other Patent Inventions: Economic History and the Patent Controversy in the Twenty-First Century,” https://papers.ssrn.com/​sol3/​papers.cfm?abstract_id=2344853.

  16. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Random House, 2011), 125.

  17. Foroohar, “Big Tech vs. Big Pharma.”

  18. Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things outlines this issue in depth.

  19. Levy, In the Plex, chapter 7, section 3, covers the book-scanning project.

  20. Ibid., 273.

  21. Ibid., 350.

  22. Ibid., 359.

  23. Ibid., 362–63.

  24. Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things, 260.

  25. Per interview with Google executive on background in 2017.

  26. Author interview with Taplin in 2017.

  27. Author interview with Taplin in 2017; see also Move Fast and Break Things.

  28. Levy, In the Plex, 251.

  29. Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things, 127–28.

  30. Wikipedia, s.v. “Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market,” last modified May 19, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_Digital_Single_Market.

  31. Mehreen Khan and Tobias Buck, “European Parliament Backs Overhaul of EU Copyright Rules,” Financial Times, March 26, 2019.

  32. “ ‘Purchased Protest’ Bombshell: Germany’s FAZ News Uncovers the Seamy Underbelly of Google’s Article 13 Lobbying,” Music Technology Policy, March 16, 2019.

  33. Khan and Buck, “European Parliament Backs Overhaul of EU Copyrig
ht Rules.”

  34. Editorial Board, “EU Copyright Reforms Are Harsh but Necessary,” Financial Times, March 26, 2019.

  35. Pew Research Center, Newspaper Fact Sheet, June 13, 2018.

  36. Rana Foroohar, “A Better US Patent System Will Spur Innovation,” Financial Times, September 3, 2017.

  37. Lance Whitney, “Apple, Google, Others Settle Antipoaching Lawsuit for $415 Million,” CNET News, September 3, 2015.

  38. Dan Levine, “Apple, Google Agree to Settle Lawsuit Alleging Hiring, Salary Conspiracy,” The Washington Post, April 24, 2014.

  39. Author interview with Peter Harter, 2017.

  40. James Thomson, “Tech Giants Buy Start-ups to Kill Competition, Kenneth Rogoff Tells Summit,” Financial Review, March 7, 2018.

  41. Olivia Solon, “As Tech Companies Get Richer, Is It ‘Game-Over’ for Startups?” The Guardian, October 20, 2017.

  42. Marc Doucette, “Visualizing Major Tech Acquisitions,” Visual Capitalist, July 24, 2018.

  43. “American Tech Giants Are Making Life Tough for Startups,” The Economist, June 2, 2018.

  44. Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 110.

  Chapter 6: A Slot Machine in Your Pocket

  1. Wesley Yin-Poole, “FIFA Player Uses GDPR to Find Out Everything EA Has on Him, Realises He’s Spent over $10,000 in Two Years on Ultimate Team,” Eurogamer, July 25, 2018.

  2. Biographical information on Fogg can be accessed at https://www.bjfogg.com/.

  3. Rana Foroohar, “Silicon Valley Has Too Much Power,” Financial Times, May 14, 2017.

  4. Author interview with Fogg, August 14, 2018.

  5. “Slot Machine: The Crack Cocaine of Gambling Addiction,” KS Problem Gaming, http://www.ksproblemgambling.org/​html/​slot_machine.html.

  6. Author interviews with Harris.

  7. Author interview with Fogg, 2018.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Hannah Kuchler, “How Facebook Grew Too Big to Handle,” Financial Times, March 28, 2019.