Tim Wu, a prominent critic of the big tech companies, is joining the White House as a competition policy consultant, sending a clear message to Silicon Valley that Joe Biden hopes to tame America’s most valuable companies.
As an author of influential books on technology policy The Curse of Bigness, The master switch and 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 the author of a frequently quoted phrase that describes the exchange that search engine and social network users make 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 the big tech companies – especially Facebook, Google and Amazon – as creating a “new golden age” similar to the late 19th and early 20th century era of railroad construction in the USA and “barons” thieves ”. He said his “life mission” is “to fight the bullies”.
Wu previously worked for the New York attorney general, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Economic Council, and as a legal advisor to a Supreme Court judge. He will now take on a new role as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy.
The appointment of President Biden to a professor at Columbia Law School will put Silicon Valley on the alert that major acquisitions, such as Instagram and WhatsApp purchases on Facebook, may still be undone, at a time when companies from technology face antitrust lawsuits from US officials.
During his campaign, Biden argued that Section 230 – the part of U.S. law that prevents social media companies from being sued for content posted on their websites by users – should be repealed. The debate was further fueled after Facebook and Twitter banned former President Donald Trump from their platforms in January.
Biden also said that breaking up big tech companies was “something we should look at very closely.”
Wu’s arguments about the damage to competition and online speech caused by the dominance of a handful of large technology companies informed the antitrust focus of Elizabeth Warren’s election campaign in the United States. “A good look at mergers over the past decade is a high priority,” he told Wired in 2019. “I don’t think these oligopolies are good for employees, good for productivity, good for anything.”
When the U.S. Department of Justice and 11 state attorney generals sued Google for its dominance in searches last year, Wu told NPR: “This case signals that the antitrust winter is over.”
In December, the United States Federal Trade Commission and 46 states announced that they were initiating an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, asking for penalties that could include forced separation – a position that Wu openly supported. He also rejected the social networking group’s argument that the antitrust lawsuit could pave the way for the dominance of Chinese technology while harming American companies.
Wu’s appointment comes at a time when Apple also finds itself in the sights of regulators in Europe this week, with the UK competition authority opening an investigation into the rules of the App Store. FT reported that the EU is close to formally accusing the iPhone maker of antitrust abuse for the first time, following a complaint from the music service Spotify.