The full text of this Book Review/Essay may be found here.
30 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 1157 (2020).
Book Review/Essay by Michael Wolfe*†
[T]
imothy Wu’s book, The Curse of Bigness, offers a brief history on and critical perspective of antitrust law’s development over the last century, calling for a return to a Brandeisian approach to the law. In this review-essay, I use Wu’s text as a starting point to explore antitrust law’s current political moment. Tracing the dynamics at play in this debate and Wu’s role in it, I note areas underexplored in Wu’s text regarding the interplay of antitrust law with other forms of industrial regulation, highlighting in particular current difficulties in copyright law as one of the underlying tensions driving popular discontent with the major technology firms or “tech trusts.” I consider the continuing influence of Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, now more than forty years old, and how the current reform movement might execute a shift as lasting and substantial as the one Bork spearheaded with his book.
Timothy Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (Columbia Global Reports, 2018). $14.99.
* Intellectual Property Fellow, Duke University School of Law.
† © 2020 Michael Wolfe. This Article is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, which permits unrestricted use, reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the author and the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal are credited. Full license terms are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.