Susan Crawford

On a gray day in February 2010, Brian Roberts sat facing the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee. The panel was holding its first hearing on a proposed merger between two of the country’s most powerful media companies, the cable distribution giant Comcast Corp. and the entertainment conglomerate NBC Universal. Roberts, the chief executive officer of Comcast, was a calm and friendly witness. If the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Communications Commission approved the merger, Comcast’s future as the largest distributor of information in the country would be assured. Comcast had been gaining strength as a monopoly...

Editor’s note: Susan P. Crawford is a contributor to Bloomberg View and a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School. She is a former special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology and innovation policy. The opinions expressed are her own. In the article “Easter Island’s End,” Jared Diamond described the steps that led to the deforestation of a subtropical, fertile paradise. Over a few hundred years, inhabitants used the gigantic palm trees around them as rolling surfaces on which to haul stones; they then used more trees to lever the stones...