The Curse of Bigness Quotes

“The new monopolists of the Gilded Age preferred to believe that they were not merely profiteering, but building a new and better society. They were bravely constructing a new order that discarded old ways and replaced them with an enlightened future characterized by rule by the strong, by a new kind of industrial Übermensch who transcended humanity’s limitations. The new monopolies were the natural successor to competition, just as man had evolved from the ape.”
― Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

“From the beginning, Microsoft had proven the mantra that good artists copy but great artists steal. Its first operating system (MS-DOS) was actually a clone of CP/M, another operating system.* Microsoft Windows was a rip-off of the Apple Macintosh operating system; Microsoft Word and Excel were copies of Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3, respectively.”
― Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

“A renewed economic nationalism around the world blames immigrant workers, foreign products, or elite conspiracies for the diminishment of the middle class.”
― Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

“Harlan read the Sherman Act as a literal ban on trusts, which, as he would later say, presented the danger of a “slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.”
― Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

“What happened? The law is currently suffering from an overindulgence in the ideas first popularized by Robert Bork and others at the University of Chicago over the 1970s. Bork contended, implausibly, that the Congress of 1890 exclusively intended the antitrust law to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers. That theory, the “consumer welfare” approach, has enfeebled the law. Promising greater certainty and scientific rigor, it has delivered neither, and more importantly discarded far too much of the role that law was intended to play in a democracy, namely, constraining the accumulation of unchecked private power and preserving economic liberty. Forty years ago, the famed Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky warned that it is “bad history, bad policy, and bad law to exclude certain political values in interpreting the antitrust laws.” He was right.”
― Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age