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The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

Tim Wu

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Tim Wu
Age: 54
Academic
Journalist
Legal Scholar
Washington
District of Columbia
Timothy Wu
Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu
吳修銘
Empire
Every
Empires
Crucial
Blessing
Century
Implicit
Information
Explicit
State
Twentieth
States

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You know, the only reason net neutrality is controversial is because it's complicated.
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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.
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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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We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.
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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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Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.
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I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.
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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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One thing I'll say about Hitler that many people don't realize - and I don't mean to besmirch the industry - but he did get his start, not only as an artist, but as an advertising man writing art for advertisements.
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I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.
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One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.
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If you really care about content, you should pay for it.
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Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.
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When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.
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There is this inherent human instinct that the usual way you control trolling is you force people to use their real identities. So there's less trolling on Facebook, for example.
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Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.
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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.
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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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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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Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.
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