Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, DC
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Big Tech critic and antitrust hawk Tim Wu joins the Biden administration to work on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council. has announced Friday.
The employment signals that the Biden administration is serious about competition policy and is likely to be viewed favorably among progressives hoping to see greater enforcement of antitrust laws, especially against tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Wu’s writing played a major role in promoting the idea that large technology companies should be split to revive competition, especially through his 2018 book, “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”
Wu has helped shape some of the most important technology debates in the past decade. He coined the term “net neutrality” to describe the idea that internet service providers should not discriminate between different types of online communication. The Federal Communications Commission has established a net neutrality rule under Obama, which has been reversed under the next administration, although Biden’s FCC could revive the rule.
Wu recently taught antitrust law at Columbia University and previously worked for the New York Attorney General’s Office, the Federal Trade Commission and the NEC under President Barack Obama.
However, Biden has not yet performed top antitrust duties in his administration. His election to the FTC and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division will either reinforce the idea that he is ready to fight technology companies and concentrate power, or undermine it. News reports of Biden’s possible choices for those roles led the range of progressives aligned with Wu’s views on competition to those who continued to work or advise the technology companies themselves, which critics fear would be too indulgent with them.
Improving the regulation of technology companies has been a rare topic of union between Democrats and Republicans in recent years. When House Democrats came out last year with their lengthy report on the alleged anti-competitive conduct of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, several key Republicans said they agreed with the report’s main allegations, if not the proposed legislative changes exactly on which included them.
It was also a common thread between Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump, under which the DOJ and the FTC filed antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook, respectively. The Biden administration is expected to continue those processes and could even expand their scope.
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