American legal scholar, Julius Silver Professor of Law at Columbia, and for two decades the most influential academic voice arguing that American antitrust law has forgotten its own original purpose. Wu — who coined "net neutrality" in 2003 and served as special assistant to President Biden for technology and competition policy from 2021 to 2023 — works in a line of argument he traces explicitly to Louis Brandeis: that concentrated private economic power is itself a threat to democratic self-government, regardless of whether it happens to produce low consumer prices.
The Master Switch (2010) surveys the history of American information industries — telephone, radio, film, cable — and argues that each began in open, decentralized ferment and was then closed into monopoly or tight oligopoly; the book asks whether the internet will break or continue that "Cycle." The Attention Merchants (2016) traces the two-century history of business models built on capturing and reselling human attention, from the penny press to Facebook. The Curse of Bigness (2018), a short polemic, is his most explicit political-economic argument: that the "consumer welfare" standard introduced into antitrust by Robert Bork in the 1970s has been a disaster, and that the older Brandeisian tradition — treating bigness itself as a political problem — needs to be recovered. The "New Brandeis" or "hipster antitrust" movement that has since reshaped U.S. competition policy under both the Biden FTC (Lina Khan) and DOJ draws heavily on Wu's framing.