Meet Tim Wu, the man behind Biden’s push to promote business competition

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WASHINGTON – Tim Wu has been given a second chance to change the way the government regulates American companies.

Mr. Wu, a law professor and progressive antitrust leader, is a key architect of the executive order President Biden signed on Friday that aims to make American companies more competitive.

He helped write a similar order in the final months of the Obama administration, which led to a few new regulations. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 election, scrapping plans for a broad regulatory push and later scrapping some new rules.

President Biden signed an executive order Friday that says it will boost competitive markets by reducing corporate concentration that harms consumers, workers and small businesses. Photo: Evan Vucci / Associated Press

Now Mr. Wu is back in the White House as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, and he and other Biden administration officials are picking up where the Obama team left off five years ago.

The executive order gives Biden support for ideas that Wu has championed publicly, launching dozens of regulatory initiatives that the White House says will help workers and small businesses in markets dominated by large corporations, in industries from technology platforms to airlines to hearing. lozenges;

Mr. Wu, in a paper written after leaving the Obama White House to return to Columbia Law School, outlined a strategy for “using industry-specific laws, rule-making, or other state regulatory tools to achieve traditional competition objectives associated with antitrust laws.”

Tim Wu ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party’s nomination for deputy governor of New York in 2014, as deputy to governor’s candidate Zephyr Tekotte. Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

The White House refused to make Mr. Wu available for an interview. A senior White House official said the executive order matches the president’s campaign commitments to address issues such as prescription drugs, employment contracts and the power of big tech companies.

“We have all benefited from [Mr. Wu’s] Prior to working in the field and his writing, “the official said. That’s why the president brought him in as a special assistant, is to work on this set of issues. As you can imagine, his vision and his work on this was central to this effort.”

The work of the on-demand crew began in earnest after Mr. Wu arrived at the White House in March, as Mr. Wu and others reached out to regulators to get ideas about what should be included in the application — and suggested some of them, an official said.

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In 2020, Wu and other former Obama administration officials called for a new office in the White House that would pressure federal agencies to boost competition. The executive order would create a new competition board, led by the chair of the White House National Economic Council, “to coordinate the federal government’s response to the growing power of large corporations in the economy,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Friday’s executive order also tells the FCC to restore net neutrality rules that prevent Internet service providers from slowing down certain types of content or traffic. Such rules were adopted under the Obama administration but were abolished under Trump.

The five-member FCC is currently split between two Democrats and two Republicans, with one vacancy yet to be filled.

Early in his academic career, Mr. Wu was credited with coining the term net neutrality as he wrote papers warning about broadband service providers discriminating between different types of Internet traffic.

Many industry executives do not share Mr. Wu’s views.

“We are disappointed that the executive order paraphrases misleading claims about the broadband market, including the tired and substantiated assertion that ISPs will prevent or throttle consumers from accessing Internet content of their choice,” trade group NCTA-Internet and Television Association, which represents providers Internet service, on Friday.

More recently, Mr. Wu has been among the most active and prominent members of a growing intellectual movement that argues that US policymakers have failed to adequately enforce antitrust laws, allowing large corporations to accumulate too much power over both commerce and politics.

Biden’s administration and competition

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In a 2018 book, The Curse of Pride, he argued that the United States was in a new golden age where unchecked economic concentration was increasing income inequality and threatening democracy itself. He wrote: “The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved by the failures of economic policy to meet the needs of the common people.”

Mr. Wu carried copies of the book to a 2019 congressional hearing on antitrust policy in the tech sector, and handed one over to a reporter after his testimony.

Mr. Wu’s critics question both his political prescriptions and the assumption that the economy is increasingly strengthening.

They say the dominant approach to antitrust law, which focuses on potential harm to consumers rather than company size or the level of industry concentration, is more likely to produce positive economic outcomes.

Big companies bring with them benefits for consumers, like a large airline that can coordinate flights between a range of destinations, said Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think-tank that receives funding from companies and nonprofit groups.

By seeking to reduce the market share of large firms, he said, “the risk is that you end up creating companies with valid economies of scale and scale and other advantages of scale — you start to reduce that.”

Mr. Wu has also been involved in politics, launching an unsuccessful 2014 New York campaign for the Democratic nomination for deputy governor of New York, as deputy nominee for Gov. Zephyr Tekotte, a Fordham Law School professor.

One campaign worker, Lena Khan, another critic of the recent US approach to antitrust policy, is now chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Khan and Mr. Wu briefly worked together at Columbia Law School before taking up their current job.

On Friday, the White House executive order encouraged Ms Khan to adopt a number of new regulations in line with the ideas she espoused before her appointment to the FTC, including rules for internet marketplaces, business contracts, and data collection through big technology platforms.

Mr. Wu has degrees from McGill University and Harvard Law School and worked as a clerk to US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer before taking on a series of academic and government positions.

Write to Ryan Tracy at [email protected]

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