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Comment by Tim Wu

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Columbia law professor; antitrust scholar
History shows a typical progression of information technologies [...] from open to closed system.
AI Verified source (2015)
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AI Verified The quote is authentic and correctly attributed to Tim Wu. The 2015 WIRED article contains the full wording and explicitly introduces it as a quotation from Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch: “History shows a typical progression of information technologies ... from open to closed system.” Reliable secondary coverage from 2010 also quotes the same line from The Master Switch, so the quote predates the 2015 WIRED page; that page is a Jennifer Stisa Granick article quoting Wu, not Tim Wu’s original publication. ([wired.com](https://www.wired.com/2015/08/the-end-of-the-internet-dream/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 18d ago
AI Unverifiable Quote attributed to Tim Wu (2015) from Wired source URL "the-end-of-the-internet-dream". WebFetch on wired.com failed (Claude Code unable to fetch). Web search confirms: (1) The Wired piece is actually Jennifer Granick's August 2015 Black Hat keynote, in which she *quotes* Tim Wu from his book "The Master Switch" (2010); (2) the original Wu phrasing is "a typical progression of information technologies, from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system." So the attribution to Tim Wu is correct in substance, though the original source is The Master Switch (book), not the Wired/Granick piece. Vote "for" on "digital services deteriorate as they scale up" is loosely aligned with Wu's open-to-closed thesis but the connection is indirect. Marking ai_unverifiable due to inability to fetch the cited source URL. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 1mo ago
replying to Tim Wu