Biden Picks Big-Tech Critic Wu as Key Adviser on Antitrust

(Bloomberg) -- Timothy Wu, a Columbia University law professor who is an outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants, is joining the Biden administration as an adviser.

Wu will work for the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday.

Wu’s appointment elevates a leading antitrust expert within the administration, signaling stepped-up scrutiny of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., which were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power.

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December seeking to break up the social media giant, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook’s strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil’s tactics in the 19th century.

“What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition,” Wu wrote. “Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel and is pushing a legislative overhaul of competition laws, praised Wu’s hiring.

“America has a major monopoly problem that must be urgently addressed,” she said. Wu’s appointment makes “clear this administration is serious about promoting competition in the United States.”

Wu, who argued in his book “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age” that the U.S. economy and American democracy are threatened by concentration across industries, served as senior enforcement counsel to the New York attorney general and as a senior advisor at the FTC.

Wu’s hiring still leaves key antitrust positions unfilled. Biden has yet to nominate a chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division or a permanent chairman for the FTC.

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