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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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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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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.
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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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
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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.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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You know, the only reason net neutrality is controversial is because it's complicated.
Tim Wu
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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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When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.
Tim Wu
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One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.
Tim Wu
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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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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.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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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.
Tim Wu
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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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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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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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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.
Tim Wu
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I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems.
Tim Wu