Event

The Curse of Bigness Revisited - Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

Wednesday, March 28, 2018 17:00to19:00
Chancellor Day Hall Maxwell Cohen Moot Court (NCDH 100), 3644 rue Peel, Montreal, QC, H3A 1W9, CA

This year, Tim Wu will be giving the McGill Law Journal Annual Lecture.

We live in times of nearly unparalleled industrial concentration coupled with an increase in inequality around the developed world. Consequently, the question of “bigness” has returned with an urgency unparalleled since the 1910s.

The question is simply stated: whether extreme levels of concentrated industrial power are compatible with the promise of widespread economic opportunity, rough equality among citizens, or even representative democracy itself?

A century ago, similar economic condition prompted the development of the anti-trust laws. Can and should the laws be revitalized to meet the challenges of our times?

The lecture will be followed by a cocktail in the atrium.

The speaker

Tim Wu is the author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires and of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Wu has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Slate magazine, and others. He is also the father of the Net Neutrality theory. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School, and clerked for the United States Supreme Court.

Wu previously served as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, Chair of Media reform group Free Press, as a fellow at Google, and worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry. He was named to The National Law Journal’s “America’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers” in 2013, and to the “Politico 50” list in 2014 and 2015.

A request for accreditation for 2 hours of continuing legal education for jurists has been made to a recognized provider.

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