It’s commonly argued that they don’t really deserve blame for this demise. According to this strain of conventional wisdom, it was inevitable that the price of knowledge would evaporate in the presence of the Internet. That narrative casts these companies as innocent bystanders, when, in fact, they were active, brutal accomplices. To build their empires, they targeted the weak economic underpinnings of knowledge and they knocked them right out. It was Jeff Bezos who pioneered this approach, even before the Internet had begun to truly take form—and he chose the most unlikely starting place.
