Washington Lawyer - September/October 2024 - 39

WORTH READING
OSI
Burn Book:
A Tech Love Story
Kara Swisher
Simon & Schuster, 2024
Review by Don Allen Resnikoff
I
am attracted to books that
present antitrust law and competition
policy issues to a broad
audience, and I see educating
the public about competition
issues as a laudable goal. Kara
Swisher's Burn Book is a recent
example that caught my interest.
On the New York Times Best Seller list for weeks,
Burn Book first captured my attention because
it is unusually popular for a book on competition
policy. It's great that Swisher is able to attract
a broad audience because of the book's
focus on bad behavior of big tech company executives,
but there is a problem with the emphasis
on actions by leadership: It neglects the
importance of legal reform and vigorous law
enforcement to correct the problem.
Burn Book goes into great detail on how tech
business superstars like Tesla's Elon Musk, Meta's
Mark Zuckerberg, and Google's Larry Page
and Sergey Brin failed to keep their promises to
do good rather than evil. When their businesses
became too large and powerful, Swisher
writes, these tech titans became narcissistic
and greedy billionaires in the John D. Rockefeller
robber baron mold. The big tech companies
they have led are the modern equivalents of
the Rockefeller-led Standard Oil industrial giant
that the U.S. government broke up in the early
1900s, Swisher argues.
To critics, these tech leaders are considered
evil in part because they make money by trading
on data they take from platform users, a
scheme enhanced by click-bait strategies that
lead users into content that is false and undermines
their mental health. As Senator Elizabeth
Warren warned on Twitter (now X) concerning
Facebook (now Meta), " Anybody on the internet
knows that Facebook has monopoly power
. . . We need stronger antitrust laws to [break up
big tech] and finally unwind mergers like Facebook,
WhatsApp, and Instagram. "
Swisher certainly
has an understanding
of antitrust
law and competition
policy
reforms that
would counter
misbehavior, and
she has the ability
to articulate those
understandings.
At one point in
her book, she
briefly complains
about the failures
of elected officials to pass " legislation to protect
anyone. " She points to the need for legislation
providing improved privacy protections,
updated antitrust laws, algorithmic transparency
requirements, and reforms addressing the
negative effects of the information platform
businesses on people's mental health. But she
offers little detail.
It is reasonable to guess that Swisher also supports
such government enforcement efforts as
opposing acquisition of rivals by large companies
like Facebook and suing Amazon concerning
its actions against suppliers, but Swisher
does not give us a lot on these topics.
I hope that Swisher's emphasis will shift in the
future, with less focus on tech business personalities
and their unethical behavior and more
on law reform and government enforcement.
It must be clear to her that their prime motivation
is money, and until the U.S. legal system
imposes remedies that have a cost, tech leaders
will not give up the exploitative practices
that Swisher characterizes as evil.
While Swisher's book could have had more to
say about law reform and government enforcement,
it does tell the story of her success as a
business journalist, and it is an interesting one.
Swisher deserves considerable respect for her
accomplishments in this area. She had the insight
that big tech and its leaders are of great
interest to people. She also perceived that print
journalism is in decline, which led her to clever
use of modern digital media, including podcasts
and live conferences.
Swisher also found a brilliant mentor in Walt
Mossberg, who pioneered reporting on tech
business at the Wall Street Journal and became
preeminent in the field. When Swisher teamed
up with Mossberg, she was able to use the
continued on page 44
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