Welcome to the Tech Meam Right Home for Friday, March 5th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Tim Wu joined the Biden administration and that sound you hear is a collective gulp coming from Silicon Valley.

A tweet undo button has been unearthed.

Turntable.FM has resurfaced.

New data suggests the death of Silicon Valley might be slightly exaggerated,

and of course the weekend long read suggestions.

Here's what you miss today in the world of Tech.

I've said before that Tim Wu has been one of the most influential people in terms of shaping

how I think about tech, both its history and its economics and its culture its culture but beyond that he's also been known for years now as being a big proponent of various antitrust ideas relating to the tech industry. He literally coined the term net neutrality,

so regulation, antitrust, all that stuff has been on his plate for years.

And thus, eyebrows are being raised, no doubt, in the highest levels of the tech oligarchy today

by the news that Tim Wu is joining the National Economic Council as a special assistant to President

Biden for Tech and Competition Policy, quoting the New York Times.

The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by Progressive Democrats and Anti-Monopoly groups,

suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like

Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, including working with Congress on legislation to strengthen antitrust. on Mr. Wu has warned about the consequences of too much power in the hands of a few companies and said the nation's economy

resembled the gilded age of the late 1800s.

Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for

nationalistic and extremist leadership. Mr. Wu wrote in his 2018 book, The Curse of Bigness,

Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.

Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google,

Facebook, and Amazon, he added.

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