Franklin Foer

“Monopolists always defend their monopolies by arguing that competition is wasteful. When the railroad barons completed their monopoly, they argued it would be wasteful to have competing rail lines, AT&T said the same thing. But today, the size and scope of these monopolies is different.”

“We think of Netflix as a great personalization machine. It understands how you love French midcentury cinema and British murder mysteries, so examples of those pop up in your personalization engine. But you're also getting fed a lot of Netflix content.”

“The first book advance I got was paid out in thirds. And over time, as I've had different deals, the advances get chopped up into ever-smaller parcels.”

“When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn't really think too much about that.”

“Google's ability to pick winners and losers in the information world is a menace. These companies have the ability to determine which media companies are successful and which ones are failures. If I adopt a business plan that doesn't line up with Google's, then they're not going to reward me.”

“If I'm reading my Facebook feed, it's using algorithms, procedures, and methods to give me what I want, or what it thinks that I want, or what suits its business plan.”

“Mark Zuckerberg has never really had pressure put on him. He's an engineer, and he's created this perfect system that is Facebook, and he's always been concerned about the internal beauty and logic of this creation that he's created. I don't think that the human implications of what he's created have often been apparent to him.”

“Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.”

“As the 2016 campaign has graphically illustrated, Trump doesn't treat rivals gently. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1993, he began with his rote protestations of friendship.”

“Trump considers himself such a virile example of masculinity that he's qualified to serve as the ultimate arbiter of femininity. He relishes judging women on the basis of their looks, which he seems to believe amounts to the sum of their character.”

“There's no reason why there needs to be one search engine or one social network or one store that we buy all of our crap from. It's possible to imagine a world in which there's actually competition.”

“There's this proud American tradition of worrying about the power of communication companies. That going all the way back to the founding, we've tried to limit the power of monopolies that played a role in our democracy.”

“Having a friend in the Kremlin would help Trump fulfill his longtime dream of planting his name in the Moscow skyline - a dream that he pursued even as he organized his presidential campaign.”

“Michael Bradley has the stuff of leadership; he works hard and can break up the opponent's play. However, that's not enough to justify his philanthropic attitude towards possession, the generous portion of balls that he contributes to his foes. His sloppiness constantly culminates in unnecessary goals.”