Tim Wu famous quotes

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.
-- Tim Wu

#Mind #Cash

We're going to put Hulu ahead of you, unless you pay up
-- Tim Wu

#Pay

BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.
-- Tim Wu

#Uplifting #Media #Empowering

The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.
-- Tim Wu

#Innovation #Antidote

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

#Breakup #Communication #Years

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

#Blessing #Information #Empires

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.
-- Tim Wu

#Breakup #Ideas #Political

If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.
-- Tim Wu

#Swings #Opposites #Age

Net neutrality is the principle that the service providers who control or access, who own the pipes, should not favor some content over another. It's, you know, an even playing field for stuff on the Internet, and, you know, I think it's very important to the medium that it have a rough quality among contents. Everyone has their shot.
-- Tim Wu

#Thinking #Important #Quality

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

#Believe #Exercise #Liberty

History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel-from open to closed system.
-- Tim Wu

#Technology #Typical #Hobbies

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.
-- Tim Wu

#Thinking #Pay #Starting

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

#Media #Space #Growth

I wish more of the web had stayed nonprofit. But the advertising model took over and I think has delivered us to where we are, along with the development of content, which is designed to do nothing else but make you click on it or share it. And I think it's kind of a low goal for content, and I think that's taken us to our current abyss.
-- Tim Wu

#Taken #Thinking #Goal

Let's say you're someone's phone, and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is which happens to have paid, you know, whoever makes your phone at the right moment. I think we're in a future where frankly we are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don't have that already.
-- Tim Wu

#Drinking #Coffee #Thinking

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.
-- Tim Wu

#Order #Google #Weakness

Advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It doesn't have any natural limit, and we haven't found the place for the limit. And I think it's really important, therefore, that some of the revolts that are undergoing right now, you know, whether it's ad blockers or other things, are people trying to set some lines so that we say, you know, this far but no further. And this is where it ends.
-- Tim Wu

#Thinking #People #Important

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.
-- Tim Wu

#Goal #Giving #Trying

Take back the web because it is a situation that really isn't working for anyone.
-- Tim Wu

#Situation

When you pay for stuff, it has more of your interests in heart.
-- Tim Wu

#Heart #Pay #Stuff

More than anyone else, Adolf Hitler completely understood the union between government propaganda and between - and advertising, that they were in some ways the same thing.
-- Tim Wu

#Government #Unions #Way

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

#People #Too Much #Boring

If you really care about content, you should pay for it.
-- Tim Wu

#Care #Pay #Should

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

#Mean #May #Preference

There's always going to be a tradeoff between trolling and anonymity, and I guess that's the way life will be. And you can manage it, but you can't cure it.
-- Tim Wu

#Way #Cures #Manage

I think Google is the most successful attention merchant - profitable attention merchant in the history of the world, most successful advertising-only based company - most profitable. They started a very idealistic, beautiful company in many ways, but they didn't have a business model.
-- Tim Wu

#Beautiful #Successful #Thinking

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

#Thinking #Ideas #People

Socialization would be the most successful thing to bring mainstream audiences to online computers.
-- Tim Wu

#Successful #Would Be #Computer