Tim Wu

Biden-Harris Administration Launches Initiative on Junk Fees and Related Pricing Practices

After President Joe Biden called on all agencies to reduce or eliminate hidden fees in September 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) took action to effectively eliminate billions in banking fees. Fees account for tens of billions of dollars in revenue – a substantial source of revenue in many industries, including transportation, banking, internet, and hospitality.  The CFPB's actions work in tandem with other initiatives

How Google and Amazon Got Away With Not Being Regulated

In the 1990s and 2000s, the web and the internet were new and everything was going to be different forever, and the chaos made it easy to think that bigness—the economics of scale—no longer really mattered in the new economy. After a decade of open chaos and easy market entry, something surprising did happen. A few firms—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—did not disappear. Unfortunately, antitrust law failed to notice that the 1990s were over. Instead, for a decade and counting, it gave the major tech players a pass—even when confronting fairly obvious dangers and anticompetitive mergers. 

The Republican Attack on California

Recently, California passed its own network neutrality laws, to ban blocking and throttling of the internet, as a stand-in for the federal net neutrality rules abandoned by the Trump administration in June. California has obvious reasons to want to protect an open internet: It is the land of the internet’s origin, and a place where tech entrepreneurship has thrived. If the Republican Party actually believed in economic decentralization, it might well accept the premise of state rules where the federal government explicitly disclaims any authority to act.

The case for breaking up Facebook and Instagram

Facebook is widely expected to refashion Instagram into a fully integrated sub-unit of Facebook — which, given Facebook’s record, suggests minimal privacy and maximized advertising. But it’s also clear, in retrospect, that the Instagram acquisition helped reinforce the dominance by Facebook of the social-networking world. A key question has been lost in coverage of the transition: Just why is Facebook in control of Instagram, its greatest natural competitor, in the first place? Isn’t antitrust law supposed to stop companies from buying off their rivals to achieve market dominance?

Antitrust via Rulemaking: Competition Catalysts

Some observers note a decline in competition in American industry; fewer new firms are entering the market, and markets are becoming more concentrated. Federal and state agencies can devise regulations to catalyze competition. Federal and state agencies can use different types of rules to spur competition, including deregulation, which removes rules that discourage new firms, or switching price rules, which makes it easier for consumers to try a new service provider (such as the rule that phone customers can keep their phone number when changing service providers).

Letting Sprint and T-Mobile Merge Is a Terrible Idea

[Commentary] The merits of some mergers make for a close case, but the proposed merger between the mobile carriers Sprint and T-Mobile, which would create a new telecommunications behemoth, is not one of them. Basic economics strongly suggests the proposed combination should be dead on arrival, at least if the nation’s antitrust law still stands for competition and lower prices for consumers.

How the FCC's Net Neutrality Plan Breaks With 50 Years of History

[Commentary] Did Obama really invent net neutrality? Even in a country with famously short attention spans, at least some people might have noticed that net neutrality has been around longer than that. So where did net neutrality come from? How did it get started? What’s now called the “net neutrality debate” is really a restatement of a classic question: How should a network’s owner treat the traffic that it carries? What rights, if any, should a network’s users have versus its owners?

Why the Courts Will Have to Save Net Neutrality

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai faces a serious legal problem. Because he is killing net neutrality outright, not merely weakening it, he will have to explain to a court not just the shift from 2015 but also his reasoning for destroying the basic bans on blocking and throttling, which have been in effect since 2005 and have been relied on extensively by the entire internet ecosystem. This will be a difficult task. What has changed since 2004 that now makes the blocking or throttling of competitors not a problem?

Why Blocking the AT&T-Time Warner Merger Might Be Right

[Commentary] The prospect of a president using antitrust law to punish political opponents is deeply disturbing. So when news emerged this week that the Justice Department had said that Time Warner or AT&T would have to sell properties like CNN or DirecTV before the department would approve their merger, it was widely taken as Mr. Trump’s revenge against CNN, the news network he loves to hate. It seemed to fit a classic “dirty tricks” narrative.

But should we so quickly conclude that the Justice Department is doing something wrong? Maybe not.

How Twitter Killed the First Amendment

[Commentary] In this age of “new” censorship and blunt manipulation of political speech, where is the First Amendment? Americans like to think of it as the great protector of the press and of public debate. Yet it seems to have become a bit player, confined to a narrow and often irrelevant role. It is time to ask: Is the First Amendment obsolete? If so, what can be done? These questions arise because the jurisprudence of the First Amendment was written for a different set of problems in a very different world.

The ‘Fix’ for Net Neutrality That Consumers Don’t Need

[Commentary] President Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, announced plans to eliminate net neutrality (technically, make it “voluntary”) despite its popularity, record of success and acceptance by most of the industry. His proposal is of dubious legality. But should it succeed, the only real winners will be the cable and phone industries, which will gain yet another way to raise prices for everyone.

The proposal is the epitome of senseless government action and sharply out of step with Trump’s populist mandate. Did Trump voters really vote for higher cable bills? In analyzing the attack on net neutrality, one looks in vain for the problem that needs to be fixed. Net neutrality refers to rules intended to ensure that broadband providers cannot block content or provide faster delivery to companies that pay more. The policy was put in place in the George W. Bush administration, where it enjoyed bipartisan support. In the years since, it has sheltered bloggers, nonprofit organizations like Wikipedia, smaller tech companies, TV and music streamers, and entrepreneurs from being throttled by providers like AT&T and Verizon that own the “pipes.” The idea of killing net neutrality certainly has nothing to do with voters or majority will. Instead, the proposal, like Pai’s earlier gutting of privacy protections for cable customers, is at war with the economic populism that voters claimed they wanted and that Mr. Trump promised.
[Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School]

Goodbye, Net Neutrality; Hello, Net Discrimination

[Commentary] In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality. Specifically, “Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint Federal Communications Commissioners that support open Internet principles like net neutrality?” “The answer is yes,” President Obama replied. “I am a strong supporter of net neutrality.”

If reports in the Wall Street Journal are correct, President Barack Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Thomas Wheeler, has proposed a new rule that is an explicit and blatant violation of this promise. In fact, it permits and encourages exactly what Obama warned against: broadband carriers acting as gatekeepers and charging Web sites a payola payment to reach customers through a “fast lane.”

FCC Chairman Wheeler released a statement accusing the Wall Street Journal of being “flat-out wrong.” Yet the Washington Post has confirmed that the new rule gives broadband providers “the ability to enter into individual negotiations with content providers … in a commercially reasonable matter.” That’s telecom-speak for payola payments, and a clear violation of President Obama’s promise.

This is what one might call a net-discrimination rule, and, if enacted, it will profoundly change the Internet as a platform for free speech and small-scale innovation. It threatens to make the Internet just like everything else in American society: unequal in a way that deeply threatens our long-term prosperity.

[Wu is professor at Columbia Law School]

Net Neutrality and the Idea of America

[Commentary] Network neutrality has undoubtedly captured national attention. You’d be excused for wondering what all the fuss is about. Most people have a rough sense that net neutrality is about the rules for Internet traffic; but the precise debates about regulatory authority and the rules themselves are abstruse. Net neutrality has seized the moment because it is standing in for a national conversation about deeper values.

It is, among other things, a debate about opportunity -- or more precisely, the Internet as another name for it. As such, the mythology of the Internet is not dissimilar to that of America, or any open country -- as a place where anyone with passion or foolish optimism might speak his or her piece or open a business and see what happens. No success is guaranteed, but anyone gets to take a shot. That’s what free speech and a free market look like in practice rather than in theory.

The ideal of equality in the public sphere is another underlying theme in the current debate. While there’s always been some inequality, it is especially acute today. The prospect that the FCC might allow a “fast lane” for some traffic, leaving everyone else in a slower lane, has ignited the argument that private inequality must have its limits, and that some public spaces must remain open to all.

Apart from these abstract ideas, net neutrality is also standing in for a debate regarding the future of television, which is the most popular medium of our time. The clash between Comcast and Netflix over allegations of false congestion and the payment of extra fees is woven into the larger discussion. Comcast, of course, mainly represents what television is now, while Netflix represents what it is becoming.

One Billion Hearts, Bleeding as One

[Commentary] Over the last 5 years, the Web has witnessed a dramatic degree of centralization and standardization. That mostly has made life simpler and easier. Heartbleed, the vulnerability in SSL encryption recently discovered, makes this clear, as did the National Security Agency spying revelations in June 2013.

Once upon a time, having an account compromised might only mean so much. But as we centralize more, and put more of our lives online and into consolidated accounts, the damage from being compromised is greater.

The standard advice is just to change your passwords more often. But what would actually make the web ecosystem less vulnerable is not just better security, but more diversity and more competition at every level, even among encryption standards.

As annoying as it may seem, we’re safer when we have more accounts, with different types of encryption, spread across multiple companies. Otherwise, as the analogy goes, if all the gold is stored at Fort Knox, a thief knows where to go.