Bücher von Tim Wu

We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms-big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the twentieth century. In The Curse of Bigness, Tim Wu, special assistant to President Biden for technology and competition policy, explains how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age-but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.

One of the Best Books of the Year The San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto) From Tim Wu, author of the award-winningThe Master Switch( aNew YorkerandFortuneBook of the Year) and who coined the term "e;net neutrality'a revelatory, ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. Ours is often called an information economy, but at a moment when access to information is virtually unlimited, our attention has become the ultimate commodity. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of efforts to harvest our attention. This condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. Wu's narrative begins in the nineteenth century, when Benjamin Day discovered he could get rich selling newspapers for a penny. Since then, every new mediumfrom radio to television to Internet companies such as Google and Facebookhas attained commercial viability and immense riches by turning itself into an advertising platform. Since the early days, the basic business model of ';attention merchants' has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your time, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Full of lively, unexpected storytelling and piercing insight, The Attention Merchants lays bare the true nature of a ubiquitous reality we can no longer afford to accept at face value.

ANew YorkerandFortuneBest Book of the YearAnalyzing the strategic maneuvers of today's great information powersApple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&TTim Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire.It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industryfrom the telephone to radio to filmonce existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Webthe entire flow of American informationcome to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of "e;the master switch"e;? Here, Tim Wushows how a battle royale for Internet's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.