Tim Wu

Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination

This paper examines the the concept of network neutrality in telecommunications policy and its relationship to Darwinian theories of innovation. It also considers the record of broadband discrimination practiced by broadband operators in the early 2000s.

Copyright's Communications Policy

This paper suggest that the main challenges for 21st century copyright are not challenges of authorship policy, but rather new and harder problems for copyrights communications policy. Since its inception copyright has set important baselines upon which publishers and their modern equivalents compete.business. As the pace of technological change accelerates, copyrights role in setting the conditions for competition is quickly becoming more important, even challenging for primacy the significance of copyrights encouragement of authorship. The study of copyrights communications policy has both a descriptive and a normative payoff. First, it helps us understand both the existing copyright code and the history of 20th century copyright. Second, it helps us ask whether copyright is in line with other important goals of national communications policy.

The Copyright Paradox

Copyright law has become an important part of American industrial policy. Its rules are felt by every industry that touches information, and today that means quite a bit.1 Like other types of industrial policy, copyright in operation purposely advantages some sectors and disadvantages others. Consequently, today’s copyright courts face hard problems of competition management, akin to those faced by the antitrust courts and the Federal Communications Commission.2

Blind Spot: The Attention Economy and the Law

Human attention is a resource. An increasingly large and important sector of the economy, including firms such as Google, Facebook, Snap, along with parts of the traditional media, currently depend on attentional markets for their revenue. Their business model, however, present a challenge for laws premised on the presumption of cash markets. This paper introduces a novel economic and legal analysis of attention markets centered on the “attention broker,” the firms that attract and resell attention to advertisers. The analysis has important payouts for two areas: antitrust analysis, and in particular the oversight of mergers in high technology markets, as well as the protection of the captive audiences from so-called “attentional theft.”

Is Music the Next eBooks? An Antitrust Analysis of Apple’s Conduct in the Music Industry

Over the last twenty years, two waves of technological change have transformed the way people purchase and listen to music. First, digital downloads displaced physical sales of albums. More recently, digital downloads, once the primary way to gain access to digital music, have come to be challenged by streaming services. Apple, a leader in the digital download market with iTunes, has engaged in various strategies to meet the challenge. This paper specifically focuses on two types of conduct – Apple’s pressure on labels to enter into exclusive license agreements, also known as windowing, and Apple’s pressure on the market to abandon streaming options like Spotify’s “freemium” service.This paper conducts an antitrust analysis of windowing in the music industry and also examines the legality of eliminating the advertising-based “free” streaming model. The paper engages in an examination of Section 1 and Section 2 Sherman Act claims against Apple for these exclusionary acts based on parallel exclusion, joint refusal to deal, price maintenance, and monopoly maintenance theories. We believe of greatest concern is the potential elimination of the free advertising based model, which may be a per se violation of the antitrust laws.

Bell labs and centralized innovation

Replaying the long-term costs of monopolized innovation.