“Because it has the appearance of rigor, the danger is that you may get the idea that you are getting the whole picture, that you now really understand what’s going on.”

That’s author and Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, in his review today of the popular business and tech blog Stratechery written by Ben Thompson. Wu argues that while Thompson’s signature concept of “aggregation theory” is a useful lens through which to understand the idealized workings of a digital platform business, it’s insufficient when applied to the antitrust arguments against the tech giants. While the scale and low cost of online transactions might enable these tech companies to aggregate their way to success in entirely new ways, what they do to protect their dominance in the marketplace — like Google paying Apple billions to be the iPhone’s default search engine — is decidedly old-fashioned.

Reviewing Ben Thompson’s Stratechery