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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.

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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Trying
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Idea
Chat
Think
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More quotes by Tim Wu

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The most interesting thing about Google is its founders hated advertising.
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When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.
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One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.
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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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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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The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.
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Every time you click on a like button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that. And so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is.
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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.
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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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If you really care about content, you should pay for it.
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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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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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I don't think anyone at Google feels happy about it, but they've been in some sense, you know, enslaved to their business model, and so they have to satisfy their advertisers.
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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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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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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The Holy Grail of advertising has always been advertisement that people want to watch, which occasionally happens. You know, the Super Bowl, people sit there and watch the advertisements. Some print advertising is very beautiful.
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