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The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.

Tim Wu

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Tim Wu
Age: 54
Academic
Journalist
Legal Scholar
Washington
District of Columbia
Timothy Wu
Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu
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More quotes by Tim Wu

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Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.
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I'm kind of concerned the combined effect, not only Google, all these companies is kind of to make us more boring and that seems the opposite of what the Internet was supposed to be.
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You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.
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If you really care about content, you should pay for it.
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When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.
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Movies you pay for - well, sometimes they throw some ads at the beginning now - but generally you pay for ads. And that business model - actually, much more ancient, paying for stuff - is much more straightforward in terms of the incentives of the people who are then giving you the stuff.
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The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.
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Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.
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When you decide to like something, I mean, you may feel you're sort of innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that, you know, you'd essentially like to be advertised to by this company.
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Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.
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I am the most concerned that we end up in a situation where your - everything is known about you and so therefore, not only Google, but Google, Facebook, Twitter - the whole set of companies - essentially knows all your weaknesses and therefore how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do.
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What's so interesting about the internet - I keep saying this - is the web has gotten worse over the last five years as opposed to better.
Tim Wu
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The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.
Tim Wu
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There's always people - it doesn't take many - who have a different psychological makeup than most of us who really get joy out of provoking. They don't always believe the things they say, they just like to watch people go crazy. You know, I knew people like that in elementary school - bullies of one kind or another.
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Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power. If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.
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Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.
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You have to think back to the '90s. The computer was this terrible-looking thing that was trying to compete with the television. And it was this idea of email and chat rooms and this kind of stuff that first people - got people there.
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Now, he doesn't control the media, but Donald Trump has been incredibly successful in having his face appear everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing that face somewhere maybe 10 times.
Tim Wu
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Advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid there to be there.
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In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries. You know, we had spaces that ads didn't leave. They stayed where they were on the page. They didn't float around over the text. And we're kind of lost on the internet. We don't have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent.
Tim Wu