Platform Extraction Breeds Autocracy

When digital platforms concentrate transaction, attention, and infrastructure rents, they create a small, unaccountable extracting class whose enrichment produces broad economic stagnation and social resentment that can be mobilized into anti‑democratic politics. Framing platform dominance as an 'age of extraction' links antitrust and tech policy directly to democratic resilience rather than only to consumer prices or innovation. — If accepted, this reframes antitrust and tech regulation as central to defending liberal democracy and shifts policy debates from narrow market fixes to integrated industrial and political remedies.