Tim Wu

Timothy "Tim" Shiou-Ming Wu (born 1972) is a Taiwanese American legal scholar and official in the Biden Administration tasked with Technology and Competition policy. He was also a professor of law at Columbia University and a contributing opinion writer for ''The New York Times''. He is known legally and academically for significant contributions to antitrust and communications policy, coining the phrase "network neutrality" in his 2003 law journal article, ''Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination''. In the late 2010s, Wu was a leading advocate for an antitrust lawsuit directed at the breakup of Facebook.

Wu is a scholar of the media and technology industries, and his academic specialties include antitrust, copyright, and telecommunications law. He was named to ''The National Law Journal''s "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers" in 2013, as well as to the "Politico 50" in 2014 and 2015. Additionally, Wu was named one of ''Scientific American'''s 50 people of the year in 2006, and one of Harvard University's 100 most influential graduates by ''02138'' magazine in 2007. His book ''The Master Switch'' was named among the best books of 2010 by ''The New Yorker'' magazine, ''Fortune'' magazine, ''Publishers Weekly'', and other publications.

From 2011 to 2012, Wu served as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, and from 2015–2016 he was senior enforcement counsel at the New York Office of the Attorney General, where he launched a successful lawsuit against Time Warner Cable for falsely advertising their broadband speeds. Wu also served on the National Economic Council in the Obama administration under Jeffrey Zients, and currently serves under Director Brian Deese. In the Biden Administration, Wu notably helped author the 2021 Executive Order on Competition.

Early life

Wu was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Basel and Toronto. His father, Alan Ming-ta Wu, was from Taiwan and his mother, Gillian Wu (née Edwards), is a British-Canadian immunologist. Wu and his younger brother were sent to alternative schools that emphasized creativity, and he became friends with Cory Doctorow.

Wu attended McGill University, where he initially studied biochemistry before switching his major to biophysics, graduating with a BSc in 1995. He then attended Harvard Law School, graduating with J.D., ''magna cum laude,'' in 1998. At Harvard, he studied under copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig.

Career

After law school, Wu first spent a year at the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. He then spent two years as a law clerk, first for Judge Richard Posner on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1998 to 1999, then for Justice Stephen Breyer at the U.S. Supreme Court