Tim Wu | |||||||||||
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吳修銘 | |||||||||||
Born | Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu 1971or1972(age 52–53) [1] Washington, D.C., U.S. | ||||||||||
Education | McGill University (BSc) Harvard University (JD) | ||||||||||
Known for | coining "net neutrality"; late 2010s revival of antitrust | ||||||||||
Political party | Democratic | ||||||||||
Spouse | Kate Judge | ||||||||||
Children | 2 | ||||||||||
Relatives | Alan Ming-ta Wu (father) Gillian Edwards (mother) | ||||||||||
Chinese name | |||||||||||
Traditional Chinese | 吳修銘 | ||||||||||
Simplified Chinese | 吴修铭 | ||||||||||
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Website | www |
TimothyShiou-Ming Wu (born 1971 or 1972) is a Taiwanese-American legal scholar who served as Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy at the United States from 2021 to 2023. [2] [3] [4] He is also a professor of law at Columbia University and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times . He is known legally and academically for significant contributions to antitrust and communications policy, [5] [6] coining the phrase "network neutrality" in his 2003 law journal article, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. [7] [8] In the late 2010s, Wu was a leading advocate for an antitrust lawsuit directed at the breakup of Facebook. [9]
Wu is a scholar of the media and technology industries, and his academic specialties include antitrust, copyright, and telecommunications law. He was named to The National Law Journal 's "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers" in 2013, as well as to the "Politico 50" in 2014 and 2015. Additionally, Wu was named one of Scientific American 's 50 people of the year in 2006, and one of Harvard University's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine in 2007. [10] His book The Master Switch was named among the best books of 2010 by The New Yorker magazine, [11] Fortune magazine, [12] and Publishers Weekly. [13]
From 2011 to 2012, Wu served as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, [14] and from 2015 to 2016 he was senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General, where he launched a successful lawsuit against Time Warner Cable for falsely advertising their broadband speeds. [15] Wu also served on the National Economic Council in the Obama administration under Jeffrey Zients, and served under Director Brian Deese during the first term of the Biden administration. [4] In the Biden administration, Wu notably helped author the 2021 Executive Order on Competition. [16]
Wu was born in Washington, D.C., [17] and grew up in Basel and Toronto. [18] His father, Alan Ming-ta Wu, was from Taiwan [19] and his mother, Gillian Wu (née Edwards), [20] is a British-Canadian immunologist. [21] Wu and his younger brother were sent to alternative schools that emphasized creativity, and he became friends with Cory Doctorow. [20]
Wu attended McGill University, where he initially studied biochemistry before switching his major to biophysics, graduating with a BSc in 1995. [6] [20] He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating with J.D., magna cum laude, in 1998. At Harvard, he studied under copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig. [6]
After law school, Wu first spent a year at the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. He then spent two years as a law clerk, first for Judge Richard Posner on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1998 to 1999, then for Justice Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court from 1999 to 2000. [22] Following his clerkships, Wu moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, worked at Riverstone Networks, Inc. (2000–02) [23] and then entered academia at the University of Virginia School of Law. [22]
Wu was associate professor of law at the University of Virginia from 2002 to 2004, visiting professor at Columbia Law School in 2004, and, in 2005, visiting professor at both Chicago Law School and at Stanford Law School. [22] In 2006, he became a full professor at Columbia Law School. [24]
Wu's 2010 book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, described a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation. The book shows how this cycle developed with the rise of the Bell AT&T telephone monopoly, the founding of the Hollywood entertainment industry, broadcast and cable television industries, and finally with the internet industry. He looks at the example of Apple Inc., which began as a company dedicated to openness, that evolved into a more closed system under the leadership of Steve Jobs, demonstrating that the internet industry will follow the historical cycle of the rise of information empires (although Wu discussed Google as an important counterpoint). The book was named one of the best books of 2010 by The New Yorker magazine, [11] Fortune magazine, [12] Amazon.com, [25] The Washington Post, [26] Publishers Weekly, [13] and others.[ citation needed ]
Wu ran for the Democratic nomination for Lieutenant Governor of New York in 2014, campaigning alongside gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout. [27] Wu and Teachout ran against Andrew Cuomo, the incumbent governor, and Kathy Hochul, an upstate Democrat and former Representative in the House. Teachout and Wu ran to the left of Cuomo and Hochul. Hochul won the race for Lieutenant Governor; Wu took 40% of the popular vote. [28] Wu's campaign received an endorsement from The New York Times editorial board, although they offered no endorsement for the office of governor. [29] [30]
In a Washington Post interview discussing his candidacy, Wu described his approach to the campaign as one positioned against the concentration of private power: "A hundred years ago, antitrust and merger enforcement was front page news. And we live in another era of enormous private concentration. And for some reason we call all these 'wonky issues.' They're not, really. They affect people more than half a dozen other issues. Day to day, people's lives are affected by concentration and infrastructure... You can expect a progressive-style, trust-busting kind of campaign out of me. And I fully intend to bridge that gap between the kind of typical issues in electoral politics and questions involving private power." [31]
In September 2015, The New York Times reported that Wu was appointed to a position in the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. [32] During the 2018 New York Attorney General election, Wu was mentioned as a possible candidate, though he ended up not mounting a bid. [33]
Following Joe Biden's election as President of the United States, Wu had been mentioned as a possible appointee to the Federal Trade Commission, a body for which he has previously served as a senior advisor. [34]
On March 5, 2021, Wu confirmed a previous report [35] that he would be joining the Biden administration's National Economic Council as a Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy. [4] As a member of the Biden administration, Wu was responsible for helping to author the antitrust-focused Executive Order 14036. [16]
On August 2, 2022, Bloomberg News reported that Wu would leave the White House to return to his professorship at Columbia in the following months. [36] However, Wu, responded to the report by promising to not leave his position "anytime soon". [37]
On December 31, 2022, The New York Times reported that Mr. Wu's last day at the National Economic Council would be Wednesday, January 4, 2023, ending his 22-month tenure as special assistant to the Biden administration. Mr. Wu said he would return to his previous job, as a professor at Columbia Law School. [38]
Wu is credited with popularizing the concept of network neutrality in his 2003 paper Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. The paper considered network neutrality in terms of neutrality between applications, as well as neutrality between data and quality of service-sensitive traffic, and he proposed some legislation, potentially, to deal with these issues. [7] [8] In 2006, Wu also was invited by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help draft the first network neutrality rules attached to the AT&T and BellSouth merger. [6]
In 2011, Wu joined the Federal Trade Commission as an academic in residence and Senior Policy Advisor, [39] a position later held by Paul Ohm in 2012 [40] and Andrea M. Matwyshyn in 2014. [41] Wu has appeared on the television programs The Colbert Report [42] and Charlie Rose . [43]
Wu has written about the phenomenon of attention theft, [44] including in his 2016 book The Attention Merchants.
Wu has been described as a leading member of the New Brandeis movement. [45] [46] His 2018 book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, analyzed the history and principles of antitrust enforcement in the United States and argued that increasing corporate consolidation presented threats not only to the U.S. economy but also to American political system. [47]
Wu is married to Kathryn Judge, fellow Columbia law professor and lawyer. They have two daughters. [1] Wu has won two Lowell Thomas Awards for travel journalism, [48] and was on the Director's Advisory Group for the Sundance Film Festival in the late 2010s. [49] [50]
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides myriad services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privately owned.
Network neutrality, often referred to as net neutrality, is the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, offering users and online content providers consistent transfer rates regardless of content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication. Net neutrality was advocated for in the 1990s by the presidential administration of Bill Clinton in the United States. Clinton's signing of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, set a worldwide example for net neutrality laws and the regulation of ISPs.
In the United States, net neutrality—the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) should make no distinctions between different kinds of content on the Internet, and to not discriminate based on such distinctions—has been an issue of contention between end-users and ISPs since the 1990s. With net neutrality, ISPs may not intentionally block, slow down, or charge different rates for specific online content. Without net neutrality, ISPs may prioritize certain types of traffic, meter others, or potentially block specific types of content, while charging consumers different rates for that content.
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Save the Internet is a coalition of individuals, businesses, and non-profit organizations working for the preservation of Net neutrality. The site encourages taking action against discrimination of bandwidth distribution on the Internet.
Julius Genachowski is an American lawyer and businessman. He became the Federal Communications Commission Chairman on June 29, 2009. On March 22, 2013, he announced he would be leaving the FCC in the coming weeks. On January 6, 2014, it was announced that Genachowski had joined The Carlyle Group. He transitioned from Partner and Managing Director to Senior Advisor in early 2024.
Thomas W. Hazlett is the Hugh H. Macaulay Endowed Professor of Economics in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University where he also directs the Information Economy Project.
Susan P. Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She served as President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and is a columnist for WIRED. She is a former board member of ICANN, the founder of OneWebDay, and a legal scholar. Her research focuses on telecommunications and information law.
Stephen Clark Bullock is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 24th governor of Montana from 2013 to 2021. He is a member of the Democratic Party.
The Federal Communications Commission Open Internet Order of 2010 is a set of regulations that move towards the establishment of the internet neutrality concept. Some opponents of net neutrality believe such internet regulation would inhibit innovation by preventing providers from capitalizing on their broadband investments and reinvesting that money into higher quality services for consumers. Supporters of net neutrality argue that the presence of content restrictions by network providers represents a threat to individual expression and the rights of the First Amendment. Open Internet strikes a balance between these two camps by creating a compromised set of regulations that treats all internet traffic in "roughly the same way". In Verizon v. FCC, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated portions of the order that the court determined could only be applied to common carriers.
The Internet Must Go is a 2013 independent docufiction short web film about net neutrality, directed by Gena Konstantinakos.
Verizon Communications Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, 740 F.3d 623, was a case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacating portions of the FCC Open Internet Order of 2010, which the court determined could only be applied to common carriers and not to Internet service providers. The case was initiated by Verizon, which would have been subjected to the proposed FCC rules, though they had not yet gone into effect. The case has been regarded as an important precedent on whether the FCC can regulate network neutrality.
Zephyr Rain Teachout is an American attorney, author, political candidate, and professor of law specializing in democracy and antitrust at Fordham University.
Net neutrality law refers to laws and regulations which enforce the principle of net neutrality.
C. Scott Hemphill is a legal academic whose scholarship focuses on intellectual property law and antitrust law. He is currently a Professor of Law at New York University Law School, where he has taught since 2015. Previously, Hemphill was a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.
United States Telecom Association v. FCC, 825 F. 3d 674, was a case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upholding an action by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the previous year in which broadband Internet was reclassified as a "telecommunications service" under the Communications Act of 1934, after which Internet service providers (ISPs) were required to follow common carrier regulations.
Arguments associated with net neutrality regulations in the US came into prominence in mid-2002, offered by the "High Tech Broadband Coalition", a group comprising the Business Software Alliance; the Consumer Electronics Association; the Information Technology Industry Council; the National Association of Manufacturers; the Semiconductor Industry Association; and the Telecommunications Industry Association, some of which were developers for Amazon.com, Google, and Microsoft. The full concept of "net neutrality" was developed by regulators and legal academics, most prominently law professors Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell often while speaking at the University of Colorado School of Law Annual Digital Broadband Migration conference or writing in the Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law.
The New Brandeis or neo-Brandeis movement is an antitrust academic and political movement in the United States which argues that excessively centralized private power is dangerous for economical, political and social reasons. Initially called hipster antitrust by its detractors, also referred to as the "Columbia school" or "Neo-Progressive antitrust," the movement advocates that United States antitrust law return to a broader concern with private power and its negative effects on market competition, income inequality, consumer rights, unemployment, and wage growth.
Executive Order 14036, titled Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy and sometimes referred to as the Executive Order on Competition, is the fifty-first executive order signed by U.S. President Joe Biden. Signed on July 9, 2021, the order serves to establish a "whole-of-government effort to promote competition in the American economy" by encouraging stronger enforcement of antitrust law.
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