Tim Wu, a prominent critic of Big Tech companies, acts as an adviser on competition policy at the White House and sends a clear message to Silicon Valley that Joe Biden hopes to tame America’s most valuable businesses.
As the author of influential books on technological policy The curse of greatness, The main switch and The attention traders, Wu is best known for coining the phrase “net neutrality” in 2002 to describe rules that guarantee equal access to the internet.
He is also a frequently mentioned author who describes the exchange users of search engines and social networks with their personal data: ‘When an online service is free, you are not the customer. You are the product. ‘
Wu described the wealth and power of Big Tech companies – especially Facebook, Google and Amazon – as a ‘new gilded era’ similar to the late 19th and early 20th centuries of American railroad construction and ‘robber barons’. He said his ‘life mission’ was to ‘fight bullies’.
Wu previously worked for the New York Attorney General, the Federal Trade Commission, and the National Economic Council, and as a legal clerk with a Supreme Court justice. He will now take up a new position as Special Assistant to the President of Technology and Competition Policy.
President Biden’s appointment as a professor at Columbia Law School will alert Silicon Valley that major acquisitions such as Facebook’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp could still be undone, at a time when tech companies are dealing with antitrust actions from U.S. authorities.
During his campaign, Biden argued that Article 230 – the part of US law that protects the protection of social media companies against content posted by users on their websites – should be repealed. The debate was further ignited after Facebook and Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from their platforms in January.
Biden also said that breaking up Big Tech businesses “is something we need to look at very carefully”.
Wu’s arguments about the damage to online competition and online discourse caused by the dominance of a handful of Big Tech companies have fueled the antitrust focus of Elizabeth Warren’s US election campaign. “A good look at the mergers of the past decade is a major priority,” he told Wired in 2019. “I do not think these oligopolies are good for employees, good for productivity and good for anything.”
When the U.S. Department of Justice and 11 state attorneys general sued Google over his dominance over search, Wu told NPR: “This case indicates that the antitrust winter is over.”
In December, the US Federal Trade Commission and 46 states announced that they were filing an antitrust case against Facebook, calling for fines that could include a forced break-up – a position that Wu openly supports. He also rejected the argument of the social networking group that antitrust actions could pave the way for Chinese dominance over technology, while harming American businesses.
Wu’s appointment comes as Apple also found itself in the sights of regulators in Europe this week, with the British competition authority launching an investigation into its App Store rules. The FT reported that the EU close to the iPhone manufacturer is formally charging antitrust abuse for the first time, following a complaint by the music service Spotify.