Wu’s clerkship came to a close, the country was infected with dot-com fever. “He believed he had a big job trying to defend the middle ground in the court - to form a caucus of reasonable adults.” “One of Breyer’s favorite things was to ask, ‘What does Sandra think?,' ” referring to Sandra Day O’Connor, who was often the pivotal vote until she retired in 2006. Wu said, were expected to find out what the other justices were contemplating. Wu served as a clerk to Justice Stephen G. Wu to be a contrarian - and to find an independent road in the broad territory between heavy-handed government interference and free-market anarchy. But he wanted someone to be his critic - to match wits with him intellectually, to fight with him and tell him why he was wrong.” “Richard Posner is a kind of law demigod,” Mr. Posner, a federal appellate court judge, influential University of Chicago law professor, prolific author and blogger. She is also a Columbia law professor and Mr. Lessig recommended that another student receive the same clerkships, and she did. Wu was “unusually gifted” and helped arrange two clerkships for him. “I didn’t know what cyberlaw was exactly, but it seemed cool,” Mr. But he didn’t really know why he was at Harvard until he wandered into a cyberlaw class taught by Lawrence Lessig, an early advocate of an open Internet. Wu was headed toward a career in “the family business - science,” when, he noted wryly, “I had a sort of rebellion.” It took the form of an application to Harvard Law School, where he spent the next three years.
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“Hey, it was a different time.” His younger brother, David, is now a computer game software developer.Ī biochemistry major at McGill University, Mr. In high school, Tim Wu got a part-time job writing software, while operating an online bulletin board, “the main purpose of which was to move around pirated software,” he said. “That computer changed our lives, my brother’s and mine,” he said. Thanks to his mother’s farsighted purchase of an Apple II computer in 1982, Tim Wu says proudly that he became something of a geek. And a depressing afternoon at an Atlanta strip joint. What got him to this point of influence and authority, besides his creative legal scholarship, was firsthand experience in Silicon Valley during the wildest days of the dot-com era. But his opinion is nonetheless sought out by rule makers. Wu is one of the most influential voices arguing that net neutrality be fully protected by law and regulation, which, in his view, means treating the Internet like a regulated utility, for the good of all. Until now, the idea in a way has been more important than what the regulations have actually said.”īut what the law says is important, even paramount, and Mr. Except for legitimate purposes like protecting the network itself, there shouldn’t be discrimination against one form of content or another or one provider or another. It’s become a kind of norm of behavior, what you can and can’t appropriately do with the Internet. “I think that’s what’s happened with net neutrality.
Wu told me recently in his Columbia office. “Sometimes what everybody thinks about the law is more important than what the law itself says,” Mr. In other words, these arcane matters of engineering and jurisprudence stir people up because they appear to violate net neutrality. is considering whether to bless the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which could put a single company in control of the Internet pipes into 40 percent of American homes. has signaled its intention to grant cable and telephone companies the right to charge content companies like Netflix, Google, Yahoo or Facebook for speeding up transmissions to people’s homes. What makes the current debate so contentious is that the F.C.C. (They may be released in draft form on Thursday.) regulations that haven’t even been proposed yet.
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Most everyone embraces net neutrality, yet the debate over how to accomplish it is so volatile that more than a million signatures have been filed protesting F.C.C. Called “net neutrality,” short for network neutrality, it is essentially this: The cable and telephone companies that control important parts of the plumbing of the Internet shouldn’t restrict how the rest of us use it. Wu developed a concept that is now a generally accepted norm. A dozen years ago, building on the work of more senior scholars, Mr. Tim Wu, 41, a law professor at Columbia University, isn’t a direct participant in the rule making, but he is influencing it. The Federal Communications Commission is making decisions that may determine how open the Internet will be, who will profit most from it and whether start-ups will face new barriers that will make it harder for ideas to flourish.
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The future of the Internet - which means the future of communications, culture, free speech and innovation - is up for grabs.
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