Joe: Lewis, I'm looking at my glasses right now. They probably cost, what, $15, maybe $20 to make? Yet most of us pay hundreds for them. Lewis: Right. And we just accept it. It's the 'eyeglass tax' on life. You need to see, you pay the fee. Joe: What if I told you that the reason for that markup isn't just branding? It's the work of a single, invisible empire that controls almost every pair of glasses you've ever bought. And its playbook is now being used to control the internet itself. Lewis: An invisible empire for eyeglasses? That sounds like a Bond villain's business plan. "My first step, Mr. Bond, is to control the world's vision!" Joe: It's the perfect entry point into today's book, The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu. And Wu is the perfect person to write this—he's a top Columbia law professor, the guy who literally coined the term 'net neutrality,' and even served as a special assistant to the President on technology and competition policy. He's been in the trenches of this fight. Lewis: Okay, so he's got the credentials. But this 'curse of bigness'... it sounds a bit dramatic. Weren't the old robber barons a good thing in some ways? Didn't they build America with their big, ambitious projects?

Joe: That's the exact myth Wu wants to bust. He argues we've forgotten a crucial, and frankly terrifying, lesson from the generation that fought World War II. After the war, the Allies didn't just disarm the German army and prosecute Nazi leaders. They did something else, something we've completely forgotten: they systematically broke up Germany's biggest corporations. Lewis: Hold on, they broke up companies? Why? Weren't they focused on, you know, rebuilding Europe and preventing another war? What does a steel company have to do with that? Joe: Everything. They saw concentrated economic power as a weapon. Wu digs up these incredible post-war reports. One American official, Walter Bennett, said, "Nothing provides a finer weapon for the budding dictator than a concentration of economic power which he can take over at the top." They believed that Hitler’s rise was made possible by Germany’s highly concentrated, cartel-driven economy. Lewis: A weapon? Like, a company is a weapon? How does that work? Joe: Wu points to the most chilling example: IG Farben. This was a massive German chemical and pharmaceutical monopoly. It wasn't just a company that supported the Nazis; it was an integral part of the Nazi war machine. They produced the synthetic rubber for the military, the explosives, and most infamously, the Zyklon B gas used to murder over a million people in the death camps. Lewis: Oh, wow. I knew companies were involved, but I didn't realize it was that direct. Joe: It gets darker. Wu describes how IG Farben, for reasons of "efficiency," built and operated its own concentration camp within the Auschwitz complex. They used slave labor from the camp to run their factories. Lewis: Wait, they ran their own concentration camp? For efficiency? That's pure evil. That's a level of corporate malfeasance that’s hard to even comprehend. Joe: Exactly. So for the post-war leaders, the logic was crystal clear. A dictator can't build a war machine from scratch. He needs a highly organized, centralized industrial base that he can just seize and point in the direction he wants. A decentralized economy of smaller, competing businesses is much harder for a tyrant to control. So, breaking up IG Farben was seen as a fundamental act of de-Nazification, as important as disbanding the SS. Lewis: So the logic was, a dictator can't build a war machine without giant, centralized companies to do the work? That makes a terrifying amount of sense. And was this just a German thing? Or did they apply this logic elsewhere? Joe: It was a global strategy. Wu shows the same thing happened in Japan with the "Zaibatsu." These were enormous, family-run conglomerates—think Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo—that controlled everything from banking and mining to manufacturing. They were the engine of Japanese imperialism. After the war, the American occupation, led by General MacArthur, forcibly dissolved them. They saw the Zaibatsu as one of the "groups principally responsible for the war." Lewis: So the generation that had just stared into the abyss of fascism and global war came away with one core lesson: concentrated private power is a political threat, not just an economic one. And we've just... forgotten that? Joe: We've completely forgotten it. In fact, we've started to celebrate it. And Wu's chilling point is that we're seeing the same patterns today, just without the military uniforms. Let's go back to your eyeglasses.

Lewis: Right, the Bond villain with the eyeglass empire. Unmask him for us. Joe: The company is called Luxottica. Founded in Italy in 1961, it started as a small components manufacturer. But its founder, Leonardo Del Vecchio, had a grand vision. He wanted to control the entire industry, from manufacturing to the store shelf. And he did. Lewis: How? Joe: Through a relentless campaign of acquisitions. They bought Vogue Eyewear. Then they bought the big American brands, including the most iconic ones, Ray-Ban and Oakley. But they didn't stop at brands. They needed to control where you buy them. So they bought the biggest sunglass retailer in the world, Sunglass Hut. Then they bought the biggest prescription eyewear store, LensCrafters. Lewis: That's ruthless! So they control the brands and the stores. It’s a closed loop. Joe: It gets even tighter. They also own one of the largest vision insurance providers in the US, EyeMed. So they make the frames, they own the brands, they own the stores that sell them, and they own the insurance that pays for them. Wu tells this incredible story about Oakley. In the early 2000s, Oakley got a little too big for its britches and tried to challenge Luxottica on price. Lewis: A brave move. How did that go for them? Joe: Terribly. Luxottica retaliated by dropping Oakley from all of its thousands of Sunglass Hut stores, overnight. Oakley's stock plummeted. The company was crippled. And once it was weak and bleeding, what do you think Luxottica did? Lewis: They bought it. Joe: They bought it. In a hostile takeover. And competition authorities did nothing. That's the playbook: buy or bury. And this is the exact playbook the tech giants are using, but with data instead of sunglasses. Lewis: Okay, I see it now. This is where it connects. So Facebook buying Instagram wasn't just a smart business move... Joe: Wu argues it was "monopoly maintenance." In 2012, Instagram was a huge threat. It was mobile-native, it was growing explosively with young users, and it was a social network built around photos—all areas where Facebook felt vulnerable. So, Zuckerberg paid a billion dollars, which seemed insane at the time, not just to buy a cool app, but to eliminate a future competitor. He did the same thing with WhatsApp for $19 billion. He was buying his future rivals off the field before the game even started. Lewis: And the regulators just waved it through? Joe: Waved it through. Wu points out that Facebook has had over 90 unchallenged acquisitions. Google has had at least 270. They were allowed to systematically buy up any company that could one day pose a threat. Google bought YouTube when its own Google Video was failing. They bought Waze to dominate mapping. They bought DoubleClick to dominate online advertising. It's the Luxottica model on digital steroids. Lewis: Wow. So the 'Curse of Bigness' isn't just about paying too much for sunglasses. It's about one company controlling the flow of information, another controlling our social connections, and another controlling the marketplace for everything. Joe: Precisely. And they did it right under our noses, while we were distracted by the "free" services and the cool new features.

Lewis: But how did we let this happen? If we knew this was dangerous after WWII, what changed? Did we all just fall asleep at the wheel? Joe: It wasn't an accident. Wu describes it as an "ideological heist." A fundamental shift in how we think about monopolies, engineered by a small group of academics. For most of the 20th century, antitrust law was guided by the principles we discussed—fear of concentrated power, protecting small businesses, preserving economic liberty. But in the 1970s, a new school of thought emerged, primarily from the University of Chicago. Lewis: The Chicago School. I've heard of them. Milton Friedman and all that. Joe: Exactly. And in the world of antitrust, the key figure was a law professor named Robert Bork. You might remember him from his failed Supreme Court nomination. Bork argued, very persuasively, that the entire history of antitrust law was wrong. He claimed its only legitimate goal should be "consumer welfare." Lewis: Okay, but that sounds reasonable on the surface. Who doesn't want to help consumers? I'm a consumer. I want welfare. Joe: And that's the genius of the trap. It sounds so simple and good. But here's the twist: Bork and the Chicago School defined "consumer welfare" in the narrowest possible way. It meant one thing and one thing only: lower prices for consumers in the short term. Lewis: Wait, that's it? Just lower prices? Joe: That's it. Any other consideration was deemed illegitimate. Does a merger crush a thousand small businesses? Irrelevant, as long as prices might go down. Does it give one company terrifying political power? Irrelevant. Does it stifle long-term innovation? Irrelevant. All that matters is if the new, giant, "efficient" company can offer you a cheaper product tomorrow. Lewis: That’s the Trojan Horse. It lets a company justify any monopoly, as long as they can point to some model that shows prices might drop. It’s how a company like Amazon can destroy Main Street and say, "But we deliver cheap stuff to your door in two days." It completely ignores all the other costs—the cost to workers, to communities, to innovation, and ultimately, to democracy itself. Joe: You've nailed it. It's an intellectual framework that is perfectly designed to excuse bigness. It gives a scientific-sounding, economic justification for letting monopolies run wild. And this idea, which was once radical, completely conquered the legal and political establishment in the 80s and 90s. Both Democrats and Republicans bought into it. Lewis: So we traded the big picture for a cheap toaster. We dismantled the very defenses that the post-war generation built, because we were promised slightly lower prices. Joe: That's the core of Wu's argument. We were sold a bill of goods. We were told that bigness was efficiency, and efficiency was always good. We forgot that bigness is also power, and concentrated power is, and always has been, a threat.

Lewis: This is a pretty bleak picture. We've forgotten the lessons of history, allowed a new generation of super-monopolies to rise, and even dismantled the intellectual tools we used to fight them. Is there any hope? Joe: Wu ends on a note of urgent optimism. He believes that recognizing the problem is the first step. He lays out a clear agenda: we need to reform our merger laws to stop these consolidation waves before they start. We need to conduct market investigations into industries that are already too concentrated. And, most importantly, we need to be willing to actually break up companies that have become too powerful. Lewis: Bring back the trustbusters. Joe: Exactly. But more than that, he argues we need to reclaim the purpose of antitrust. It's not just about microeconomics and price points. It's about the structure of our society. He quotes the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who is the intellectual hero of the book. Brandeis argued that the goal of a democracy is to allow for human flourishing. And you can't flourish if you are dependent on the "arbitrary will of another"—whether that's a king, a dictator, or a global corporation. Lewis: It makes you look at everything differently. The 'free' search from Google, the 'free' connection from Facebook... what's the real price we're paying for that convenience? Is it our economic freedom? Is it a functioning democracy? Joe: It's a powerful question, and it's one Wu insists we have to start asking, and fast. He warns that the road to authoritarianism is paved with economic policies that fail the broader public. When people feel the system is rigged, they become vulnerable to radical voices who promise to burn it all down. Lewis: It really feels like we're at a crossroads, then. We can either continue down this path of celebrating bigness and hope for the best, or we can relearn the lessons of the past and start to push back. Joe: That's the choice Wu leaves us with. It's not just about economics; it's about the kind of society we want to live in. We'd love to hear what our listeners think. Does the convenience of these tech giants outweigh the 'Curse of Bigness'? Find us on our socials and let us know your thoughts. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.