Anyway, Cory has been ringing the alarm about this for ages. He even has a blog post about a city that passed a similar law, but it has huge loopholes for big grocery to keep profit maxxing.
Recently it was estimated that Amazon makes $30-80 billion(!) per year off not showing you the economically best results by deliberately disallowing sorting on $ per unit [1] to force sellers into ads. Amongst other tactics (ex. filter by country of origin).
AI agents can sort on $ / unit to easily find you the best deal, rendering Amazon's various forms of paid placement irrelevant.
Extend this to filtering Chinese slop brands (also not able to be filtered) and the significant portion of revenue starts looking like knocking back margins to the 3-5% range. Basically an existential threat.
Amazon cannot allow AI agents and maintain current margins.
Sadly, they're just following in the footsteps of every large media/publishing/music conglomerate that already screwed over the vast majority of artists/musicians/writers. For every Taylor Swift striking it rich, there's 999,999 who can't even pay their bills with what their copyright gets them.
Cory Doctorow wrote a piece about DMCA wrt Canada and US tariffs in January [0], "A winning trade war strategy for Canada", which chimes with your position. I admire his work, and thought that you might like to read it, if you've not already done so.
It sounds to me like you're describing enshittification. As coined by Cory Doctorow:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
The current hiring process is a good example of the AI Arms Race that Cory Doctorow was writing about recently. https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/10/deep-state-wopr/#abelard-... - It's also a good example of a multi-polar trap. The rules of the current game assure everyone looses.
Sigh. You might be interested in this piece that came to mind from Doctorow:
“Let me explain: on average, illustrators don't make any money. They are already one of the most immiserated, precarized groups of workers out there. They suffer from a pathology called "vocational awe." That's a term coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh, and it refers to workers who are vulnerable to workplace exploitation because they actually care about their jobs – nurses, librarians, teachers, and artists.
If AI image generators put every illustrator working today out of a job, the resulting wage-bill savings would be undetectable as a proportion of all the costs associated with training and operating image-generators. The total wage bill for commercial illustrators is less than the kombucha bill for the company cafeteria at just one of Open AI's campuses.
The purpose of AI art – and the story of AI art as a death-knell for artists – is to convince the broad public that AI is amazing and will do amazing things. It's to create buzz. Which is not to say that it's not disgusting that former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told a conference audience that "some creative jobs shouldn't have been there in the first place," and that it's not especially disgusting that she and her colleagues boast about using the work of artists to ruin those artists' livelihoods.”
I can hear the response now that these are all not exactly repeating what Zitron is saying, but I will just leave it up to you all to decide if that is a good faith thing to retort here or not :). Godspeed!
Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average. [1]
No surprise, LLM companies optimize for waste. More tokens, and more prompts means more revenue. Reminds of Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan story: deliberately making search worse [1]
So where do either of you lie on the "human rights vs property rights" spectrum? Because that's the real discussion to be had here. To quote Cory Doctorow:
> But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:
> "Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.
> That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."
This sounds to me like a demand that engineers fully submit to their future as reverse centaurs [0]. "Submit to the slop tsunami, become a glorified and burnt out button pusher!"
Anyway, Cory has been ringing the alarm about this for ages. He even has a blog post about a city that passed a similar law, but it has huge loopholes for big grocery to keep profit maxxing.
Good overview: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/30/pay-for-privacy/ Specific article about Maryland: https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/gov-wes-moore-claims...