PERSON

Carl Shapiro

The industrial organization economist who proved, four decades before the AI platform wars, that technology changes but economic laws do not—and whose analysis of network effects, switching costs, lock-in, and information asymmetry maps the AI transition with the precision of a framework whose predictions have been confirmed by every information revolution since the telephone.

In 1999, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian published the sentence that would prove more durable than the entire dot-com bubble inflating around them: “Technology changes. Economic laws do not.” The sentence was a rebuke to a generation of analysts who had decided that the internet had repealed economics—that network goods, zero marginal costs, and viral adoption had created a new universe of value that the old analytical tools could not map. Shapiro and Varian’s response was not to deny the newness; it was to insist that the forces shaping information markets had always existed, that the internet had made them faster and larger but not different in kind, and that every strategic question the internet raised had a historical precedent in some earlier network industry—the telephone, the railroad, the electrical grid. Twenty-seven years later, that argument is not merely intact. It is

Keep reading with YOU ON AI