The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

Synopsis

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality" and who has made significant contributions to our understanding of antitrust policy and wireless communications, comes a call for tighter antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate bigness.

We live in an "oligopoly age" where many industries are controlled by just a few firms -- big banks, big pharma, big tech. Bigness has become too much of a drain on the nation's economy, and too far a deviation from the type of open capitalism that has, at times, created a broad-based wealth and promised a sense of opportunity to every generation. There is a good reason to believe that we once again face the "Curse of Bigness," in the phrase used by Justice Louis Brandeis, to describe the challenges confronting the United States a century ago. Columbia law professor Tim Wu tells the story of what went wrong, and calls for recovering the lost tenets of trustbusters as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas in a new age of extreme economic inequality.