Tim Wu Books
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar in technology, antitrust, and media policy. He is known for coining the term 'net neutrality' and has served in various public policy roles, including at the Federal Trade Commission and the White House.
Known for: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
Books by Tim Wu
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
A sweeping history of how businesses have captured and monetized human attention, from the rise of newspapers and radio to the age of social media. Tim Wu explores how attention has become one of the ...
The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
In this incisive work, Tim Wu explores the dangers of corporate concentration and the erosion of democratic values in the modern economy. Drawing parallels between the early 20th-century antitrust mov...
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
In this influential work, Tim Wu explores the cyclical nature of information industries, from the telephone and radio to film, television, and the Internet. He argues that each new communications tech...
Key Insights from Tim Wu
The Birth of Attention Markets
The story begins in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the penny press. Newspaper entrepreneurs like Benjamin Day of *The Sun* in New York discovered a radical idea: sell the paper cheaply, or give it away, and make money not from readers but from advertisers eager to reach those readers. This...
From The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
The Rise of Mass Media
Moving into the early twentieth century, new technologies offered richer forms of attention capture. Radio, then cinema, transformed passive reading into immersive sensory experience. For advertisers and content creators alike, this change represented a golden opportunity: to enter homes directly, t...
From The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Historical Context
To understand the curse of bigness, we must begin with its first great manifestation—the original Gilded Age. Between the 1870s and the early twentieth century, the United States experienced an industrial explosion powered by railroads, oil, steel, and finance. At the heart of this transformation wa...
From The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Antitrust
Theodore Roosevelt understood that democracy could not coexist with concentrated private power. To him, monopolies were not just inefficient—they were un-American. As President, Roosevelt confronted trusts like Northern Securities, which sought to monopolize railroads across the northern United Stat...
From The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
The Cycle of Information Empires
At the heart of *The Master Switch* lies what I call the Cycle—a recurring pattern in which every major information technology evolves from open to closed systems. It is not an accident, nor a conspiracy, but a consequence of human institutions seeking order and profit. The invention phase, full of ...
From The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
The Telephone and the Birth of AT&T
The story begins with the telephone, an instrument that seemed, at its birth, destined to abolish distance forever. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention was a marvel—a democratic device enabling any person to speak directly to another across miles of wire. The original phone networks were open, chaotic...
From The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
About Tim Wu
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar in technology, antitrust, and media policy. He is known for coining the term 'net neutrality' and has served in various public policy roles, including at the Federal Trade Commission and the White House. His work focuses on the inter...
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Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar in technology, antitrust, and media policy. He is known for coining the term 'net neutrality' and has served in various public policy roles, including at the Federal Trade Commission and the White House. His work focuses on the inter...
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar in technology, antitrust, and media policy. He is known for coining the term 'net neutrality' and has served in various public policy roles, including at the Federal Trade Commission and the White House. His work focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and market power.
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Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and a leading scholar in technology, antitrust, and media policy. He is known for coining the term 'net neutrality' and has served in various public policy roles, including at the Federal Trade Commission and the White House.
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