Tim Wu, a prominent critic of Big Tech companies, is joining the White House as an adviser on competition policy, sending a clear message to Silicon Valley that Joe Biden hopes to tame America’s most valuable companies.
As the author of influential books on tech policy The Curse of Bigness, The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, Wu is best known for coining the phrase “net neutrality” in 2002 to describe rules guaranteeing equal access to the internet.
He is also the author an oft-cited dictum that describes the trade-off users of search engines and social networks make with their personal data: “When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”
Wu has described the wealth and power of Big Tech companies — particularly Facebook, Google and Amazon — as creating a “new gilded age” akin to the late-19th and early 20th-century era of US railroad-building and “robber barons”. He has said that his “life mission” is to “fight bullies”.
Wu previously worked for the New York attorney-general, Federal Trade Commission, and the National Economic Council, and as law clerk to a Supreme Court justice. He will now take on a new position as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy.
President Biden’s appointment of the Columbia Law School professor will put Silicon Valley on notice that big acquisitions such as Facebook’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp may yet be unwound, at a time when tech companies are facing antitrust actions from US authorities.
During his campaign, Biden argued that Section 230 — the part of US law that shields social media companies from being sued over content posted on their sites by users — should be revoked. The debate was further ignited after Facebook and Twitter banned former president Donald Trump from their platforms in January.
Biden has also said breaking up Big Tech companies was “something we should take a really hard look at”.
Wu’s arguments about the damage to online competition and online discourse caused by the dominance of a handful of Big Tech companies informed the antitrust focus of Elizabeth Warren’s US election campaign. “A good hard look at the mergers of the past decade is a big priority,” he told Wired in 2019. “I don’t think these oligopolies are good for employees, good for productivity, good for anything.”
When the US Department of Justice and 11 state attorneys-general sued Google over its search dominance last year, Wu told NPR: “This case signals that the antitrust winter is over.”
In December, the US Federal Trade Commission and 46 states announced they were bringing an antitrust case against Facebook, calling for penalties that could include a forced break-up — a position Wu has openly supported. He has also rejected the social networking group’s argument that antitrust action could pave the way for Chinese tech dominance while hurting US businesses.
Wu’s appointment comes as Apple also found itself in the sights of regulators in Europe this week, with the UK’s competition authority opening an investigation into its App Store rules. The FT reported that the EU is close to formally charging the iPhone maker with antitrust abuses for the first time, after a complaint by music service Spotify.