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Wu even suggests that we are just around the corner to curb Big Tech’s dominance. “Ten years ago or at any time, they were able to get away with agreements to acquire competitors or close other companies,” he said. “It’s a much more challenging environment to do these kinds of things, and in some ways they’ve changed their behavior. And when they change their behavior, it’s hard to stay rooted like them.”
Not all has gone swimmingly in Wu’s technology policy domain. For reasons I don’t understand, we currently have no US Chief Technology Officer. Instead we have three deputy CTOs. And the Biden administration made a good move by appointing incumbent adversary Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission, not aggressively pushing the nominee to the polls or finding a replacement. As a result, midway through Biden’s term, Democrats still lack an FCC majority.
Still, it’s clear that the Biden administration has dramatically changed the antitrust landscape, as Wu advocated before moving to DC. The question now is whether this momentum can last beyond the administration. (Microsoft won a friendly settlement from the incoming Bush Justice Department after losing its suit under the Clinton DOJ in 1999.) Also, a recent Supreme Court decision on the EPA’s limited enforcement of the government’s actions against monopolistic corporations suggests similar reversals. Wu admits to being concerned. “We know we have a somewhat challenging judicial environment,” he said. “We have to be really careful with the laws; we have to make sure they’re well-rounded. But the good news is, in most of these cases, we’re only affecting long-standing authority. The administration has seen support for the proposed antitrust legislation. (But as far as I can see, to do so (He is not cracking down on Congress leaders.)
At the end of our conversation, Wu talked about what it’s like to work on antitrust from the White House. He said it was a good opportunity to try to put into practice what I had thought or written about for two decades. “In that sense, it was the experience of a lifetime.” Shortly after that conclusion, Bloomberg reported that Wu would be returning to private life “in the coming months.” Wu He quickly tweeted Rumors of his resignation have been “exaggerated,” he said. No one in government has a monopoly on denial.
Time travel
The last time the US government took a major crackdown on the technology was when it sued Microsoft. The government won the case—Bill Gates and his company had competed illegally—but in November 1999 News week column, I asked if the judge’s plan to break up the organization made sense.
Just as Microsoft denied the past, Justice Thomas Penfield Jackson seemed to deny the future. Indeed, the judge in the Microsoft antitrust case upheld the government’s key charge in his 207-page “Findings of Fact” that the company overstepped its bounds and coerced its business partners to protect its turf. (Microsoft insists that the behavior is exemplary.) But not all of the judge’s decisions actually are. Some are predictions of how the computer market will evolve over the next few years. And some of it, despite appeals-court warnings against judicial kibbutzing of software design, includes Judge Jackson’s startlingly confident views of what features do and don’t work in an operating system (OS).
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