CONCEPT
Institutional Design for AI Markets
The deliberate construction of rules, norms, and structures that determine whether AI technology serves broad human welfare or concentrates economic power — the central political project that Shapiro's economic framework identifies but does not, by itself, resolve.
Every major technology transition in information markets has produced the same sequence: capability expansion, market concentration, institutional lag, and then — if institutions arrive in time — a negotiated settlement between the technology's power and society's values. The settlement is never clean, never permanent, always contested. But the quality of the settlement determines whether the technology's benefits are broadly shared or narrowly captured. Shapiro's career spans four such settlements: telecommunications breakup, Microsoft antitrust, platform monopolies in social media and search, and now AI. Each taught specific lessons about institutional design that apply to the current moment with compressed urgency.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first lesson is that institutional design must match the speed of the market dynamics it governs. The telecommunications settlement took decades — from the 1974 antitrust filing against AT&T to the 1996 Telecommunications Act. The Microsoft case moved faster but still operated on