Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Some incumbents, like Ticketmaster and the RIAA, were strong and centralized enough to negotiate compromises, but a number of firms—industries, even—were not so lucky, and they got scraped away. John Ashcroft’s free-market authoritarianism structured the bargain between scrapers and the state regulators tasked with protecting people’s rights: The feds gave the data brokers a boost up and over the law, and the data brokers pulled the state up behind them.