#tim wu

THIS SATURDAY (July 20), I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

The telegraph and the telephone have a special place in the history and future of competition and Big Tech. After all, they were the original tech monopolists. Every discussion of tech and monopoly takes place in their shadow.

Back in 2010, Tim Wu published The Master Switch, his bestselling, wildly influential history of "The Bell System" and the struggle to de-monopolize America from its first telecoms barons:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/11/01/the-master-switch-tim-net-neutrality-wu-explains-whats-at-stake-in-the-battle-for-net-freedom/

Wu is a brilliant writer and theoretician. Best known for coining the term "Net Neutrality," Wu went on to serve in both the Obama and Biden administrations as a tech trustbuster. He accomplished much in those years. Most notably, Wu wrote the 2021 executive order on competition, laying out a 72-point program for using existing powers vested in the administrative agencies to break up corporate power and get the monopolist's boot off Americans' necks:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

The Competition EO is basically a checklist, and Biden's agency heads have been racing down it, ticking off box after box on or ahead of schedule, making meaningful technical changes in how companies are allowed to operate, each one designed to make material improvements to the lives of Americans.

A decade and a half after its initial publication, Wu's Master Switch is still considered a canonical account of how the phone monopoly was built – and dismantled.

But somewhat lost in the shadow of The Master Switch is another book, written by the accomplished telecoms historian Richard R John: "Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications," published a year after The Master Switch:

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088139

Network Nation flew under my radar until earlier this year, when I found myself speaking at an antitrust conference where both John and Wu were also on the bill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VNivXjrU3A

During John's panel – "Case Studies: AT&T & IBM" – he took a good-natured dig at Wu's book, claiming that Wu, not being an historian, had been taken in by AT&T's own self-serving lies about its history. Wu – also on the panel – didn't dispute it, either. That was enough to prick my interest. I ordered a copy of Network Nation and put it on my suitcase during my vacation earlier this month.

Network Nation is an extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America's love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications. As Wu writes in his New Republic review of John's book:

Generally he describes the failure of competition not so much as a failure of a theory, but rather as the more concrete failure of the men running the competitors, many of whom turned out to be incompetent or unlucky. His story is more like a blow-by-blow account of why Germany lost World War II than a grand theory of why democracy is better than fascism.

https://newrepublic.com/article/88640/review-network-nation-richard-john-tim-wu

In other words, John thinks that the monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren't down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way.

The White House announced a sweeping executive order Friday to promote competition throughout the U.S. economy, in the most ambitious effort in generations to reduce the stranglehold of monopolies and concentrated markets in major industries.

The order — whose details POLITICO first reported last week — also includes elements designed to lower the price of prescription drugs, protect consumers' privacy and increase scrutiny of abusive business tactics in the tech industry.

The effort marks a major push by President Joe Biden’s administration to focus on competition as part of the economic recovery from the pandemic. It also offers a response to progressives’ criticisms that the federal government has focused too much on supporting banks and other corporations without concern about the effect on consumers, who have watched their choices dwindle over the years.

Biden plans to sign the order at 1:30 p.m., the White House said.

The order’s impacts could be felt in industries including agriculture, airlines, health, broadband and banking. Previously unreported elements include a provision urging the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate its Obama-era net neutrality rules, as well as a call for financial regulators to allow data sharing among financial companies.

It dives into the specifics on some policy issues — for instance, by calling for over-the-counter sales of hearing aids, urging the Food and Drug Administration to allow imports of prescription drugs from Canada, and ending "exclusivity arrangements" in which landlords "stick tenants with only a single internet option," according to a nearly 4,000-word White House fact sheet issued Friday morning.

The White House said order will include initiatives to require airlines to refund fees to passengers who receive shoddy Wi-Fi service or baggage handling; restricting businesses’ ability to foist noncompete agreements on employees; challenge occupational licensing requirements that limit competition in industries like health care; and guarantee farmers and motorists the right to repair their own vehicles without voiding warranty protections. The last provision would also have implications for consumer products like Apple’s iPhones.

Top White House officials said the order seeks to ensure small businesses and consumers have access to fair markets.

“The overarching objective with the executive order is to make sure the president is encouraging competition in industries around the country,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday.

Taking aim at just one industry the order will cover, Psaki added: “It doesn’t sound right to most people that there are three shipping companies that are dominating the market and upping and increasing costs for suppliers, small businesses, people across the country. That doesn’t sound right or fair, because it isn’t.”

Background:

The executive order builds off one that former President Barack Obama issued in 2016, which encouraged agencies to consider competition in their decisions and rulemakings. That order — largely the work of Jason Furman, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers — came near the end of Obama’s presidency. Few agencies followed through on the White House’s prodding, and those that did saw their actions largely overturned by former President Donald Trump’s appointees.

Biden’s order goes a step beyond Obama’s by offering pointed suggestions for steps to take, rather than leaving implementation entirely to the agencies.

The new order is the product of months of negotiations among White House officials, particularly Tim Wu — who served on Obama’s National Economic Council and is now a Biden aide focused on technology and competition policy — along with the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and other federal agencies.

While the White House can command executive branch agencies like the Departments of Transportation and Agriculture to take action, the order styles its directions as “suggestions” to avoid the appearance the administration is inappropriately seeking to direct independent agencies like the FCC or FTC. That could avoid the kind of blowback that Trump faced when he pressed both agencies to crack down on social media companies.

A Columbia University law professor and antitrust advocate, Wu is considered one of the founders of the New Brandeis movement in antitrust, along with Lina Khan, a fellow Columbia professor whom Biden named FTC chair last month. Wu and Khan have both argued that the federal government should use a variety of tools beyond antitrust enforcement, particularly agency rulemakings, to promote competition.

The White House order will include these items:

Airlines and shipping: The Transportation Department will issue rules aimed at boosting transparency of airlines’ fees for baggage and Wi-Fi service while helping consumers recover those costs when their trips are delayed or the service is substandard. The agency had proposed similar rules in 2016 that would have forced airlines to disclose baggage and change fees before passengers buy their tickets, but the Trump administration canceled the rulemaking.People familiar with the executive order had said they expect it to suggest efforts to encourage competition at major U.S. airports with capacity constraints, such as New York’s JFK International and Ronald Reagan Washington National near D.C. However, the fact sheet does not mention this issue. The order also tasks the Federal Maritime Commission, which regulates ocean shipping, and the Surface Transportation Board, which oversees trucking and railroads, with seeking ways to bring down shipping costs.

Agriculture: The USDA will undertake several rulemakings aimed at protecting farmers and ranchers against unfair practices by large meatpackers and other agribusinesses. The rules seek to make it easier for the agency to challenge unfair and deceptive practices by meat processors and would allow farmers to more easily file complaints with USDA or sue under the Packers and Stockyards Act. People familiar with the order said it would also tighten the rules for so-called poultry grower tournament systems, in which contract farmers are paid more or less than their peers in the same area depending on how closely they meet buyers’ standards. The agency is also moving forward with rules that seek to increase food access through alternatives to supermarkets, like local farmer’s markets, and increase consumer transparency about where meat is raised.

Labor: The order takes aim at noncompete agreements — contractual provisions that attempt to prevent workers from switching jobs within the same industry — and urges the FTC to make rules barring or limiting them. About one in five Americans today is bound by noncompetes, particularly in tech and health care, where the clauses are common. The order will also urge the FTC and the Justice Department to challenge overly broad job licensing requirements imposed by state governments, a move the administration says could make it easier for workers to obtain new licenses when they move to a new state. During the pandemic, about half of U.S. states agreed to modify their occupational licensing requirements to allow out-of-state physicians and health care workers to work in the state or offer telehealth services.

Financial Services: The order is also expected to support open banking regulations, which seek to allow data sharing among financial firms to increase consumer convenience and price transparency. New regulations could provide more clarity about the consumer protection and cybersecurity obligations of financial apps that have access to data from customers' bank and brokerage accounts. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, consumers have the right to access their own financial data. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has yet to issue standards that would govern consumer requests and transfers, however, although it started a potential rulemaking on the subject in October. Progressive groups have called on the Biden administration to adopt a strong interpretation of the law that would make it easy for consumers to switch among banks and take advantage of innovative upstart technology firms that provide lending and investing services.

Right to repair: The order will also task the FTC with establishing rules on when consumers can bypass manufacturers to seek repairs on products they own, a concept known as “right to repair.” The widespread issue affects farmers seeking to fix their own equipment, as well as consumers who want to use cheaper independent mechanics rather than car dealerships for auto repairs ― or small repair shops instead of Apple for cracked iPhone screens. In a May report to Congress, the FTC suggested it might undertake such a rulemaking that would clarify when repair restrictions violate the law. Manufacturers have fought against “right to repair” proposals, saying they could expose customers to substandard repairs or even violate their privacy by undermining devices’ security.

by Tim Wu

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value.

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best.

Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.

For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows.

Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.

Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.

However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler.

This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.

You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression.

Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.

So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort.

We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.

As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote).

The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.

An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.

We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are.

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.

In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an “illusion of intimacy”—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being “part of a circle of friends.” The two coined the term “para-social interaction” to describe this “intimacy at a distance.”

So it is that, for many people, celebrities have become part of their built attentional environment, allowing them regular glimpses into that other world inhabited by magical creatures who look something like us, yet are beyond us. Our deities are of course nothing like the God of Abraham, or even His saints. They are, rather, more like the pagan gods of old, prone to fits of anger and vindictiveness, petty jealousies, and embarrassing bouts of drunkenness. But this only lends to their illusion of accessibility, and at least for commercial purposes makes them more compelling to follow.

The process of lawyering has potentially powerful effects on one’s conscience and character. To be someone’s lawyer — especially a personal lawyer — is to agree to take their side in a deeply unconditional way. It is to inhabit your client’s world, not in an impartial or balanced manner, but with the stated goal of advancing their interests.

...

But these are just the normal problems of representation, occupational hazards really. In some lawyers, however, there is a different, much more dramatic effect. Some — very eager to serve — go beyond partiality and undergo a wholesale transformation of character, becoming completely submissive to their client/master. Worse, they can become a zealously unhinged version of the client, distilled and fortified, like an exaggerated outgrowth of his darkest intentions. That can be bad enough in a divorce proceeding. But when such a supplicant/submissive attorney has Donald Trump as a client, the effect is almost like an explosion, leading in directions at best dangerously unethical and at worst criminal.