... Wu’s The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age is a surprisingly rousing treatment of another presumably boring subject: mergers and acquisitions ... The Curse of Bigness is skinny, more of a dip with a snorkel than a deep dive. But the pithiness of this new volume is ideally suited to its subject. Wu doesn’t want to get into all the intricacies of antitrust law; if anything, an enormous book on the problem of enormity would only fool us into believing that the subject is more impenetrable than it really is — and stoke the confusion and apathy that have allowed decades of corporate consolidation to flourish in the first place ... Wu is an able guide through the history — from Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign against 'bad trusts' all the way to the expansive bloat of AT&T and Microsoft’s competition-crushing ambitions of more recent memory — but it’s on the level of ideas that his book comes into its own ... Wu knows how to keep everything concise and contained. The Curse of Bigness moves nimbly through the thicket, embracing the boons of being small.
In this concise and accessible history, Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, takes us from the great merger movement of the late nineteenth century to the antitrust legislation and prosecutions in the Progressive Era to 'peak antitrust' in the mid-twentieth century. He judiciously describes how the 'Chicago School' of antitrust, with its narrow focus on consumer welfare, came to dominate antitrust law and ushered in our new era of monopoly capitalism ... he briskly narrates the origins and evolution of antitrust law in America ... Wu weaves his considerable knowledge of the technology and communications industries seamlessly into the arc of antitrust history—and to good effect.
And while the very term 'antitrust' may strike many as dreadfully dry, Wu manages to make this brisk and impressively readable overview of the subject (the entire text runs about 140 pages) vivid and compelling.
Short and sharp ... an excellent primer for anyone who wants to understand why corporate wealth and power have grown so concentrated in the past four decades, and why that might be a problem for democracy ... Wu’s ideas (some of which were teased at in his last book, The Attention Merchants) are already influencing the New Brandeis school of trust busters who are gaining power at the Federal Trade Commission, America’s consumer watchdog, and other regulatory agencies in Washington. If they get their way, Big Tech may look a lot smaller in the future.
Wu writes with elegance, conviction, knowledge—and certitude. But he goes over the top in his effort to slay the dragon of the so-called Chicago School of antitrust analysis ... he borrows [Supreme Court Justice Louis] Brandeis's impassioned rhetoric to express his fear that a new Gilded Age is upon us ... both Brandeis and Mr. Wu have an oversimplified vision of political markets, for economic dominance need not translate into political dominance ... Finally, Mr. Wu’s Brandeis fixation blinds him to the distinctive features of modern antitrust litigation ... With his over-concern with bigness per se, Brandeis had nothing to say about these novel issues, and neither, alas, does Mr. Wu.
Half history, half polemic ... The author convincingly draws parallels between the new 'tech trusts' and the Gilded Age titans, but one wishes for more fire in the argument: Wu’s background about Brandeis is important, but the modern implications could be better woven into his narrative. As it is, his strongest cases for breaking up Google are tucked into dry concluding policy prescriptions ... A valuable briefing on an underappreciated business problem, but it could use a bit of Roosevelt’s hard-nosed attitude.
Short but persuasive ... The book’s brevity is an asset—Wu skillfully avoids economic and legal rabbit holes, keeping the book laser-focused on his thesis: that antitrust enforcement must be restored 'as a check on power as necessary in a functioning democracy before it’s too late.' Persuasive and brilliantly written, the book is especially timely given the rise of trillion-dollar tech companies.