Cory, when I’m searching on Amazon and I see that “Amazon’s choice” — looks a little prize, like that product won a competition where a bunch of editors chose it as the best one. What am I looking at there? So that is broadly part of this thing Tim was discussing, where they’re piling on junk fees for the right to be at the top of the results, where if you’re not paying for Prime and paying for fulfillment by Amazon and paying for all these other things, you aren’t eligible. And the more of these you buy, the greater chance you have of being chosen. But is that — are they literally paying to be Amazon’s top choice? I mean, as a dumb consumer, maybe I look at that and I think: Oh, this is some algorithmic combination of is it the best seller, what are its reviews, et cetera. So you’re right that it is algorithmic, but the algorithmic inputs are not grounded primarily in things like quality or customer satisfaction. They’re grounded in how many different ways you’ve made your business dependent on Amazon in such a way that every dollar you make is having more and more of that dollar extracted by Amazon. There’s some good empirical work on this from Mariana Mazzucato and Tim O’Reilly, where they calculate that the first result on an Amazon search engine results page, on average, is 17 percent more expensive than the best match for your search. So that’s what you’re seeing is basically the Amazon top choice is the worst choice. So this really feels to me like a place where, to use Cory’s word, things are enshittified, that when I go around the internet now, when I play something in a Spotify playlist or click on a song I like and move to the radio version of Spotify, or when I search something on Google or when I search something on Amazon. These used to be very valuable services to me, and now there is so much sponsored content in every one of these results, and it is so unclear what is what and who is paying for what and why I’m getting this song or that result that this whole industry, or part of the industry, that one reason I ended up on these platforms is because I trusted these results. – And now I trust nothing. – Yeah, I mean, it’s going back to the definition of extraction. I mean, we are kind of paying $70 billion collectively to make search worse.
