WASHINGTON, D.C.—Tim Wu, the author and Columbia University professor credited with inventing the term “net neutrality,” appears likely to take a place in President Joe Biden’s new administration, according to a report by the Washington D.C. news site Politico. Wu appears headed to join Biden’s National Economic Council, where he also served in the latter days of Barack Obama’s presidency.
The potential appointment of Wu, experts say, signals Biden’s intention to take aim at the big tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, with an eye toward breaking them up—similar to the 1984 breakup of AT&T, which at that time held a virtual monopoly over the nation’s telephone service.
Possible efforts to break up big tech appeared to begin in the final days of the Donald Trump administration, last December, when the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook over its acquisitions of the highly popular social media apps Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as allegations of other anti-competitive practices.
Previous reports had said that Biden might appoint Wu to the FTC. But it is Wu’s advocacy of net neutrality, a concept which he first articulated in a 2002 academic paper titled “A Proposal for Network Neutrality,” that appears to indicate Biden’s intention to support an open internet.
“Net neutrality” refers to a set of rules that forbid internet service providers from discriminating against online data based on its source or a number of other factors. In other words, ISPs under net neutrality are prohibited from slowing, blocking, or for that matter granting an online “fast lane” to data traveling through their network. The principle is particularly important to the adult industry online, because it guarantees that data from adult sites cannot be blocked or throttled simply because it is transmitted by a porn site.
The nationwide net neutrality regulations put in place under Obama were repealed in 2018 by the Federal Communications Commission then led by Trump appointee Ajit Pai. Biden sent a strong signal that he intends to support net neutrality when he named FCC board member Jessica Rosenworcel, a strong net neutrality advocate, to serve as acting FCC chair following Pai’s resignation on January 20.
The Biden administration also dropped a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice under Trump-appointed Attorney General William Barr against the state of California. The suit was intended to stop California from enforcing its own net neutrality statute. But this week, following the Biden administration’s withdrawal of the lawsuit, a judge ruled in a separate case that California may now enact the net neutrality law.
Though Wu is clearly an advocate of net neutrality, he has also written papers in which he appears to say that the First Amendment, which prohibits laws restricting freedom of expression, may have become “obsolete” in the internet era.
“One possibility is simply to concede that the First Amendment, built in another era, is not suited to today’s challenges. Instead, any answer must lie in the development of better social norms, adoption of journalistic ethics by private speech platforms, or action by the political branches. Perhaps constitutional law has reached its natural limit,” Wu wrote in a 2017 article for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
Wu has also opposed the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that makes accessing a computer without authorization illegal. The law is widely considered overly restrictive, and critics say that it allows tech giants like Facebook to, in effect, write their own laws defining what counts as “authorization,” meaning that in some circumstances even playing computer games or chatting with friends online could be deemed “unauthorized.”
Wu has described the CFAA as “the worst law in technology.”
Photo By New America / Wikimedia Commons
