Timothy Wu on how Canada can take on U.S. Big Tech and thrive in the age of monopoly

Columbia Law School professor Timothy Wu has studied the rise of platform companies from Amazon.com Inc. to Alphabet Inc.'s Google LLC and helped devise policies to check the growing power of America’s Big Tech behemoths. Photo by  Mikiko Hayashi 

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For more than two decades, lawyer, author and Columbia Law School professor Timothy Wu has studied the rise of platform companies from Amazon.com Inc. to Alphabet Inc.‘s Google LLC and helped devise policies to check the growing power of America’s Big Tech behemoths.

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These technology platforms have optimized convenience and entertainment, yet they are also among history’s most advanced tools to extract wealth and resources from the broader economy, Wu says.

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“Consequently, as they become essential to everything, we are at risk of building an economy that is perpetually unfair for much of humanity,” Wu warns in his new book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

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It didn’t have to turn out this way; Silicon Valley infused the world with a sense of techno-optimism in the 1990s and early 2000s in a way that is “hard to overstate,” Wu writes. But by the 2010s, tech’s utopian dreams began to collide with the prospect of extraordinary profit. Big Tech swiftly perfected their use of platform power and extractive methods to grab as much data, attention, and profit as possible “in one of the greatest examples of economic extraction the world has ever seen.”

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Solutions to remedy Big Tech’s dominance over our daily lives are still in sight, Wu says in his book. The author, who spent nearly two years steering competition and technology policy for the former Biden administration, calls for “anti-monopoly programs done right (that) force the dominant firm to fight on the merits.” As Wu writes: “It is not too late to restore the early promise of the Internet economy as a common square for commerce and an agent of economic uplift for all. Prosperity, fairness, and growth aren’t incompatible.”

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In this Q&A with the Financial Post, Wu, a McGill University and Harvard Law School graduate who grew up in Toronto and Switzerland, discusses the lessons Canada can learn from American antitrust regulation, how Ottawa should approach platform regulation in an era of digital sovereignty and frayed ties with the United States, and the role of artificial intelligence in the new digital economy. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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FP: In your book, you dive into the history of antitrust regulation in the U.S., noting that the country “has long abhorred monopoly.” What are the different eras of U.S. antitrust regulation? And where does the U.S. stand now — does antitrust regulation remain a key pillar of America’s industrial policy?

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TW: The United States, during one of its progressive phases, invented antitrust as an antidote to excessive power, but also as an alternative to communism and monopoly capitalism. Over the past 140 years it has waxed and waned, through weak and strong periods. The strongest phases were the 1900s to 1920 or so, and the 1950s to 1970s; and in our era, the 2020s.