OTTAWA — U.S. President Joe Biden has pursued an ambitious antitrust agenda, seeking to curb what his administration sees as excesses of corporate power that suppress competition, wages and growth. One of the strategy’s chief architects would like to welcome Canada to the fight. 

“The anti-monopoly movement … can’t be just an American story,” says Tim Wu. 

A Columbia University law professor and author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness, Wu joined the White House National Economic Council in March 2021, serving as Biden’s special assistant for competition and technology until January 2023. 

Over the last three years, the Biden administration has applied antitrust principles to domains like hearing aids, so-called “junk fees,” non-compete clauses, and most conspicuously to Big Tech. Wu wrote some of the effort’s foundational documents, including a 72-point executive order in July 2021 that directed agencies across the U.S. government to make moves it said would open up markets and help workers.

The U.S. actions have fuelled a push from regulators and advocates in Canada for updates to this country’s competition policy. The federal government is now conducting a review, with a major focus on digital markets.

Wu was in Ottawa last week for the Competition Bureau’s annual summit. It was a homecoming, of sorts—Wu is a dual citizen who grew up in Toronto and got his undergraduate degree at McGill University.

In an interview with The Logic, Wu discussed the Biden administration’s push to rein in Big Tech, Canada’s role in the anti-monopoly movement and what lawmakers are getting wrong about AI. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When you and Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan were appointed, it was taken as a marker that the Biden administration was going to try and break up Meta or Google. Big Tech remains unbroken up. 

We’re in the middle of trying. 

Where along the path would you say the U.S. is right now?

It was important to the Biden administration that the tech monopolists got the scrutiny that they deserve, as some of the most powerful companies in the U.S. and the world. We are in trial against Google. We have a second Google case on advertising. We’re going to trial against Facebook in probably February for their acquisition program. And we have a complaint that’s filed against Amazon, something very few enforcers have been willing to get to. 

The companies are not exactly rolling over, playing dead and deciding to break up themselves. They’re almost as powerful as small countries—maybe as powerful as small countries. They’re slowing things down, resisting, defending themselves. These are big undertakings. In terms of the relative speed of antitrust, we’re relatively fast. The AT&T case was 10 years. The IBM case was [13] years. These things take an enormous amount of time. But there’s a reason—these things have big consequences. We’re talking about titans and battleships and big things.

In Canada, people who feel there’s a need for competition reform have been taking inspiration from the U.S. But some point to setbacks with Microsoft-Activision or Meta-Within and say, ‘Look how well it’s going for Lina Khan.’ 

I hear that. There’s been an effort to publicize two merger cases as indicative of broader trends. I don’t think that’s right. We have a deliberate policy of challenging more mergers. You’re not going to win every case. 

There’s a couple of things you have to count. First, has the environment in the United States for mergers changed, particularly in Big Tech? Is Facebook going to buy TikTok? No. A whole range of mergers are now off the board. We think deterrence is extremely important. The second is this is ignoring the number of abandoned and block mergers we’ve had, many of which don’t make the headlines as much. I think the FTC has stopped almost 20 mergers, so in terms of their winning record, they’re way out ahead. The government wanted to avoid the 2010s, where we really didn’t do anything on mergers that were obviously anti-competitive like Google-Waze or Facebook-Instagram.

I don’t think it’d be crazy for Canada to have a policy where you say, ‘We’re not going to win every merger challenge. But we’re gonna challenge mergers that are anti-competitive.’ Was the [Competition] Bureau wrong to challenge the Rogers-Shaw merger? No. It would have been outrageous, for them to just be like, ‘Oh, that’s fine,’ or, ‘We think we might lose 10 per cent, so even though we think it’s anti-competitive, we’re going to stop.’ No, they made their best case. It’s their job to act when they determine that illegal conduct is going on. To not do that is a dereliction of public duty.

Why are you in Ottawa?

I am of the belief the principles in the anti-monopoly movement, and some of the work we did in the Biden administration, can’t be just an American story. Other common-law jurisdictions, other parts of the developed and developing world, everyone, needs to take seriously the challenge of private economic power and the tendency of concentrated wealth and economic power to lead down a path to authoritarianism, backed by people feeling so angry and so frustrated that they turn to anti-democratic alternatives. I believe in what we’re doing here, and I was incredibly heartened and inspired to find Canadians pretty fired up and enthusiastic about trying to make Canada an example for the rest of the world.

The Big Tech companies are in your backyard, not ours. The U.S. is doing a Google advertising case, an Amazon Marketplace case. Canadian regulators have done some investigative work on those issues here, but what real power does Canada have to affect digital markets?

I think it can be overstated, the idea that, “Well, we’re too small a country to do anything.” 

I worked for the New York state attorney general. New York State’s population is smaller than Canada, but 10 million smaller, not 200 million smaller. You might say, ‘How can a state do anything? It’s too small.’ Well, we banded together with a whole bunch of other states and sued Facebook.

That’s a role Canada can play, where it feels its interests are implicated—they can join part of a broader effort. In the U.S. government, we often were working with the Europeans, the British, Australians and others—and Canadians. Some of these problems transcend borders, and that’s why countries work together.

Do the U.S., U.K. and Canada not need their Metas, Amazons, and Shopifys to compete with China’s Baidus, Alibabas, Tencents?

I’m very skeptical of those arguments. History has shown that the coddling of national champions is very tempting, but backfires in the longer run. I have a slightly different feeling about companies at the startup stage and, ‘Subsidize your own infants.’ But more often than not, you end up supporting a company that really doesn’t need much help, or needs the fires of competition to become better if they want to be an international competitor. 

In the ’70s the United States was locked in what felt like a death match with Japan, over the future of technology. Many people said, ‘The thing about the Japanese is they’re so smart. They don’t go around torturing their firms. They support them and help them. They choose the winners, and that’s why they’re going to beat us.’ What did the United States do? We broke up our telecom monopolist, AT&T. We chased IBM around and made it harder for them to seize the personal computer market, or totally dominate it. The crazy thing is, those were probably the smartest things the country ever did in terms of tech policy. Out of the AT&T breakup came all these internet providers who made the popular internet start in the United States. In the shadow of the antitrust case against IBM, you had the beginnings of the software industry, and then later you had the birth of Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle. 

In Canada, we’re rolling out incentives to match the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. There’s this hunt for megaprojects—chip factories, battery factories. How does all this policy fit together?

The Biden administration brought back both antitrust enforcement and industrial policy, which on the face of it are somewhat contradictory policies. [But] both were about giving opportunities to regions or areas or companies that hadn’t had it for a long time. 

Industrial policy needs to be approached very carefully, and not become a monopoly support program. Do we need to give Intel more money? Intel’s a pretty profitable company—I’m not sure why they need government help. 

For Canada, I would say the same thing. Are you going to join the chase and try to have a Canadian semiconductor? Canada gets in trouble when [it says], ‘Europe and America are doing this. We need to do it too. And we’ll go halfway between Europe and America.’ 

How does AI change antitrust?

I really don’t think we know yet. I do have a lot to say about AI though. This is an area where I break from many of my friends and colleagues—I think we’re doing a bad job, but in a different way than other people think. 

We’re doing way too much thinking and worrying and writing early versions of laws about a series of almost anxiety fantasies about robots taking over the universe and things like that—incredibly low-probability events that no one wants to have happen, but we’re not completely sure we’re even anywhere near. At the same time, [we’re] failing to do stuff about the open, glaring and obvious problems that AI are creating, such as human impersonation, attacks on electoral systems, [and] new forms of fraud. 

All the legislative effort goes towards these imaginary paranoid fantasies. Why don’t we have a law that forces AIs to say that they’re not human and leave digital seeds and traces that make it clear that this was created by an AI? The very basic 101 stuff is not being done. Instead, we’re doing too much random stuff. 

You’re Canadian. Apart from legislating that the Blue Jays can’t pull a pitcher too early, what would you like to see Canada do in this global antitrust revival movement? 

I am a Blue Jays fan. I did feel that pulling [José] Berríos too early captured the problem with over-analytical efforts that have also plagued antitrust. 

Canada’s really put itself on the map as a leader in certain areas, an example for others in health care, good quality of life, [and] public education. Why can’t Canada be known as a leader in competition and tech policy for doing the smart stuff, and taking advantage of its relative lack of political dysfunction to be an example for the rest of the world?