Tim Wu

Tim Wu has long been one of the most influential thought leaders on the future of the information economy. During his time in the Biden administration, Wu shaped technology-focused antitrust legislation and was the architect of President Biden’s 2021 executive order on the promotion of competition throughout the US economy.

His book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, published in 2010, was on “Best of” lists in The New Yorker and Fortune magazine and predicted the rise of “Big Tech.” In The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016), he anticipated the power of attention capture in the pre-Trump era, and the book remains the essential depiction of the attention economy. In his most recent book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018), Wu warned about the dangers of corporate and industrial concentration for economic and political future.

Currently the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science, and Technology at Columbia Law School, Wu is the recipient of numerous awards, including being named one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, one of America’s most influential lawyers, and one of Harvard’s one hundred most influential graduates. Wu was a regular contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing writer for The New Yorker.

Prior to his time in the Biden administration, Wu held numerous public service posts. He was enforcement counsel at the New York Attorney General’s Office, worked on competition policy for the National Economic Council during the Obama administration, and worked for the Federal Trade Commission on antitrust enforcement. In private industry, he worked for Riverstone Networks, was a fellow at Google, and advised Spotify in its early years in the United States. Wu is a Toronto native and graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.) and Harvard Law School.

Session:

• Platform Capitalism (Friday, April 12 - 6:15 p.m.)