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 The Curse Of Bigness, Tim Wu makes a forceful case that monopoly power is not just an economic problem but a political and moral one. He argues that when too much power accumulates in a few corpora...
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
The First Gilded Age Warns Us
Every era of extreme inequality tells a political story as well as an economic one. Tim Wu begins by looking back to the original Gilded Age, when the United States saw the rise of industrial titans such as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and the great railroad empires. These firms did not simply become s...
From The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
Roosevelt Treated Monopoly As Power
A healthy democracy cannot remain indifferent to private empires. Wu highlights Theodore Roosevelt as a central figure who understood that antitrust enforcement was not mainly about punishing success but about preserving republican government. Roosevelt believed giant trusts had grown so powerful th...
From The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
Brandeis Saw Bigness As Moral Risk
Some dangers cannot be captured in a spreadsheet. Wu draws heavily on Louis Brandeis, who offered one of the deepest critiques of monopoly in American history. Brandeis argued that the problem with bigness was not only higher prices or reduced output. It was that giant institutions distort human sca...
From The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
Antitrust Narrowed To Price Alone
When a society forgets why a law exists, it begins to use that law against itself. One of Wu’s most important arguments is that American antitrust policy lost its original purpose in the late twentieth century. A broader tradition that once targeted dangerous concentrations of private power was grad...
From The Curse Of Bigness: Antitrust In The New Gilded Age
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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