'Net Neutrality and Freedom of Speech' - Tim Wu: CIPIL Seminar

Professor Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, gave a lunchtime seminar entitled "Net Neutrality and Freedom of Speech" on Thursday 30th May 2013 at the Faculty of Law as a guest of CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law). The Internet has been widely understood, at least in the United States, as a boon to new forms of speech, though some of the quality of the speech generated is criticized. Net Neutrality is a relatively recent regulatory and normative principle that concerns the carriage of content on the Internet. In legal form it is usually mandates non-discrimination among similar content by carriers. Recently, Net Neutrality rules have been challenged as an infringement of the free speech of the telephone companies, most notably, Verizon in the United States. In this talk I'll discuss the challenge, and discuss more broadly the impact of Net Neutrality rules, or the lack thereof, on speech on the Internet. Tim Wu, currently visiting Cambridge, is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Tim Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, and his general fields are private power, free speech, copyright and antitrust. Outside of academia, he recently served as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, was former Chair of Media reform group Free Press, a fellow at Google, and worked for Riverstone Networks in Silicon Valley. He was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School. Wu has also been a visiting professor at Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago law schools. His 2010 book, The Master Switch was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker, Amazon, Scribes, Publisher's Weekly, and other publications. He was recognized as one of Harvard's 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine, and in 2013 he was recognized as one of America's 100 most influential lawyers by the National Law Journal Wu is a regular contributor to the New Yorker's business and technology vertical, and a contributing editor at the New Republic. He has also twice won the Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing. For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk