Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness

- This is a beautifully designed little book (154 pages) published by Columbia University under their scholarly imprint Columbia Global Reports.

- I’m a great fan of Tim Wu (Columbia Law School), having gobbled up his two previous books, The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants. Wu’s focus is the power of media and telecommunication corporations and their urge to close down free and open technologies, information sharing and net neutrality.  

- The Curse of Bigness is a fascinating history of antitrust law in the US and Europe, and its critical importance in sustaining real competition in markets to ensure mega corporates and monopolies don’t undermine democratic ideals and realities. 'We have managed to recreate both the economics and politics of a century ago - the first Gilded Age - and remain in grave danger of repeating more of the signature errors of the twentieth century'.

- He tells the story of the monopolies US Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T and others - built by the Morgans, Rockefellers, Guggenheims and Carnegies. 

- I vividly remember the furore over Nixon’s determination to break up AT&T (the Bell companies) in 1974. AT&T was ‘the jealous god of telecommunications, brooking no rivals, accepting no sharing, and swallowing any children with even the most remote chance of unseating Kronos.’

- And the enormous effort the Justice Department (DOJ) put into bringing down the Microsoft monopoly and its attempt, among other things, to kneecap Netscape’s browser - which Microsoft succeeded in doing. 

- And the case it brought against IBM, which was forced to stop its practice of bundling software with hardware. As a result the DOJ kickstarted the birth of an independent software industry, and the IBM PC was forced to go with an extremely open design allowing other companies like Intel, Microsoft and Apple into the PC market. 

- But during the George W Bush presidency and the increasing leverage of conservative laissez faire economists ('leave it to the market') industry concentration powered on: in telecommunications, airlines, cable, pharmaceuticals, tickets, seeds and pesticides, beer, tech.

- A deplorable example was Facebook’s purchase of Instagram: a dominant firm buying its nascent challenger - the romantic ‘disruption narrative’ of the 90’s/2000’s was rudely interrupted. 

- A UK report concluded that FB and Instagram were not competitors. Wu was aghast - ‘It takes many years of training to reach conclusions this absurd ...any teenager could have told you they were..'

- In the 2010's tech industry acquisitions have been aggressive : Facebook is up to 67 so far, Amazon 91, Google 214. ‘Cloning’, Microsoft’s major tactic (otherwise known as stealing), was also used aggressively, eg Google and Yelp, Facebook and Snapchat.

- Wu's plea is for Congress to again fire up Antitrust law and break up these monopoly corporations. '...reintroducing competition into the social media space, perhaps even quality competition, measured by matters like greater protection of privacy, could mean a lot to the public'.