Timothy Wu, a Biden appointee to the National Economic Council, was praised for his antitrust bona fides, through his authorship of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. Will he break up the big-tech monopolies that are stifling dissent?
An article he wrote in 2017, entitled “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” provides a clue. He writes that the Bill of Rights was drafted in a time where speech was expensive. But today, the internet makes speech cheap and attention rare. Therefore, to preserve the ability of people to have free access to ideas, “the First Amendment must broaden its own reach to encompass new techniques of speech control.” Yup, that’s right, speech control is now a broadening of the First Amendment, you see: the First Amendment is actually a “right that obliges the government to ensure a pristine speech environment.”
What constitutes “pristine"? Wu: “I think the elected branches should be allowed ... to try returning the country to the kind of media environment that prevailed in the [Trumanite / McCarthyite] 1950s.”
