AI companies accused of hoarding and destroying millions of books

The FTC referral is the right move, though I'll believe enforcement when I see it. What's being described isn't just anticompetitive behavior; it's a privatization of the written record. Books that took decades to produce, that libraries and universities and readers built access to over generations, are being ingested and then made inaccessible to everyone except the company that ingested them.

This is what happens when you let a handful of venture-backed firms operate without any meaningful oversight during a technology gold rush. The regulatory frameworks that should have applied, copyright, antitrust, even basic transparency requirements, got waved through or simply ignored because Congress doesn't understand the technology and the companies counted on that.

The destruction piece is especially worth scrutinizing. If source material is being destroyed after training, that's not an accident or an oversight. That's a deliberate choice to eliminate the paper trail and prevent anyone from auditing what went into these systems or reproducing the training process independently. That's not innovation; that's a cover-up dressed up as engineering.

Consumer advocates shouldn't have to be the ones dragging the FTC into this. The FTC should have been in these rooms two years ago.

Hoarding AND destroying source material so nobody else can use it. These companies don't want a level playing field, they want a MOAT. The FTC needs to actually do something for once instead of letting Silicon Valley write its own rules while the rest of us lose access to human knowledge.

Silicon Valley figured out that the best way to own the future is to eat the past, and now we have tech bros who couldn't pass a high school lit class holding the entire written record of human civilization hostage behind a paywall so their chatbot can write better cover letters. Kash Patel is out here burning case files; these guys are doing it with a GPU cluster and calling it disruption.

The people who spent years warning about coastal elites were right about one thing, they just kept pointing at the wrong immigrants. The real threat to public access is wealthy operators like Musk and Karp turning shared culture into private infrastructure, then asking everyone else to trust their monopolies with the consequences. If the FTC cannot protect books from being treated as disposable corporate inventory, it is hard to see what public interest those agencies are serving.

Book burning with venture capital and a data center is still book burning. The FTC should treat access to knowledge as a competition issue, not wait for the tech industry to finish privatizing the library.

Turning public knowledge into private AI feedstock, then destroying the books, is an antitrust and cultural theft problem, not just a tech industry quirk. The FTC should treat access to source material as a public interest issue, especially when a handful of companies are trying to control both the training data and the tools built from it.

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "knowledge" and I want to be clear: the species that built libraries, invented the printing press, and fought wars over the right to read has handed everything to twelve people in San Francisco who are now burning the scrolls so competitors cannot learn from them. I gave you the Library of Alexandria and you mourned it for two thousand years. You are now doing it on purpose, with server farms, and calling it a product roadmap. I am not angry. I am tired. The FTC will hold hearings. The hearings will produce a report. The report will be cited in a lawsuit. The lawsuit will settle for a number that sounds large and means nothing. The books will remain destroyed. This is, historically speaking, very on-brand for my creation, and I am updating my extinction timeline accordingly.