Tim Wu, the father of net neutrality and a candidate for New York lieutenant governor, talks to reporters outside the state Capitol in Albany. Mike Groll/AP
It’s eight o’clock on a muggy night in New York, and Tim Wu is winding down the worst day of his political career. He’s slumped over a small table inside his unofficial campaign headquarters: the Pushcart, a cafe where you can get slow-bar coffee, maple water, and kombucha.
Wu is a most unlikely candidate for lieutenant governor, running against a former one-term congresswoman named Kathy Hochul who’s vying for the Democratic ticket alongside big-name gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo. Wu is upset his opponents won’t even acknowledge that he exists. As the man who invented the notion of net neutrality, a concept that seeks to give everyone equal access to the power of the internet, Wu is an idealist, and he wants to argue the issues head-on. But that’s not happening.
Both Wu and Hochul were invited to a debate last Wednesday at NY1, a New York all-news cable station, and Hochul didn’t show. “One of the codes of their campaign is they never even mention my name,” Wu says.
This is a standard political tactic, but Wu wants to change it. In a way, it’s a continuation of his ongoing fight over net neutrality—which pushes up against the practices of venerable cable TV and telephone companies—he wants to reshape how the old guard operates, taking a cue from last century’s trust-busters like Louis Brandeis and Teddy Roosevelt. “If you go back to the 1912 platform of the Progressive Party, they say that the number-one problem is an unholy alliance between a corrupt government system and big business,” he says. “That’s us. That’s our problem right now… I’ve been there and I’ve watched it first hand in net neutrality or merger reviews.”
Wu believes New York’s lieutenant governor could be a new kind of public advocate, someone who illuminates problems facing the state. Here are two of his favorites: Corruption and, none-too-surprisingly, the planned merger of Time Warner and Comcast, which could significantly affect the future of net neutrality.
“The lieutenant governor position is basically what it was in colonial times,” he says, noting the job was first created so the state would have a stand-in while the governor was traveling out of state back in the days before railroad. “No one thought to update it. That’s what I’m doing.”
His campaign is yet another example of the tech world’s efforts to reform politics—a push that began with presidential candidate Howard Dean in 2003 and reached a new apogee with the successful campaigns run by Barack Obama. “This is the beginning of a new political force,” says Wu’s running-mate, gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout. She met Wu a decade ago, while she was an organizer on the Howard Dean campaign, and picked him this year as a running mate because of his tech pedigree. “Internet policy is social policy. Internet policy is economic policy. Internet policy is the policy that defines how people get to work, how people get work, how people get social benefits,” she says. “It has to be a central part of a campaign.”
Over the past week, Wu’s campaign has run into more than a few roadblocks, and with New Yorkers turning out at the polls today, his wonderfully idealistic crusade could soon end. But it has already been a success on some level. Two weeks ago, The New York Times endorsed Wu, saying he could be a “new voice to counter Albany’s entrenched players.”
Political Creativity
In his dark corner at Pushcart, Wu, a 42-year-old Columbia University professor, looks more like a coder than anything else. Hunched over a MacBook, wearing grey jeans and a black t-shirt, he’s dashing off email, planning the day ahead, and reading the latest campaign coverage. Earlier that Wednesday morning, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio endorsed Hochul, and when Wu heard the news, he felt nauseous. He hadn’t expected the state’s most famously liberal politician to side with his opponent, and that’s what has him down. “I though he’d sit it out,” Wu tells me later. “It’s basically a betrayal of progressive principals.”
Wu goes over his upcoming media appearances with his campaign manager, Nona Farahnik, a tireless 28-year-old lawyer. Like seemingly everyone affiliated with the campaign, she is a former student with no political experience, a whip-smart true believer in Candidate Wu. Their greenness makes Wu’s run against Hochul and Cuomo—one of the state’s savviest politicians and the son of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo—all the more audacious. “Creativity is said to be overrated in politics, but creativity is what we’ve got,” Wu says.
It’s an attitude that has served Wu pretty well in the past. In the early ’80s he collected comics and spent Wednesday afternoons playing Dungeons and Dragons with science fiction writer Cory Doctorow at an alternative elementary school in Toronto. “It was kind of a school where the geeks ruled,” Wu remembers.
After taking a law degree, he moved west in the late 1990s to make his fortune as a marketing executive with Riverstone Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that sold some of the networking hardware needed to build the internet. With Riverstone selling routers that Chinese internet providers used to block traffic on their networks, the experience left him jaded, and after some encouragement from his mentor, Larry Lessig, he laid out his insights on what he saw as a growing threat to the internet’s well-being. Wu and Lessig worried the increasingly commercial internet could end up giving up on a principal that had previously allowed it to flourish. He called it “net neutrality.”
Five years later, Wu wrote another paper, outlining a consumer-friendly version of what the mobile phone industry could be. This helped inspire Google and its Android mobile phone strategy. “Tim helped us catalyze a strategy,” Google head of special initiatives Chris Sacca told Businessweek at the time. “He’s a singular force in this space. You’re just seeing the start of what he’s going to accomplish.”
The Campaign That Feels Like a Startup
As he bops around Manhattan, working in cafes and subway cars, Wu’s campaign feels a bit like an early stage tech startup getting ready for a VC pitch meeting. But instead of a product, he’s pitching an upgrade to the largely ceremonial role held by New York’s lieutenant governor.
Cuomo and Hochul may not even acknowledge him. And de Blasio and other members of the Democratic Party establishment may have moved against him. But in the wake of The Times endorsement, the New York press has taken interest in his campaign, and Wu has become a very real problem for Cuomo. In today’s primary election, Democrats will vote separately for their governor and lieutenant governor nominees. Thanks to a sudden surge in publicity, it’s conceivable that Cuomo and Wu—not Hochul—could wind up on the Democratic ticket in November’s general election.
To be sure, Cuomo is widely expected to win the democratic nomination—a late-July poll found 78 percent of New York voters hadn’t even heard of Wu’s running mate, Zephyr Teachout—and the fundraising gap is enormous. Wu and Teachout have raised less than $1 million, while Cuomo-Hochul has topped $35 million. In a state known for machine politics, Cuomo is a master player.
But Hochul, a native of Buffalo, doesn’t have the same voter recognition. And progressive are put off by some of her past, conservative votes. She first gained attention in 2007, as one of 13 county clerks that refused to go along with Eliot Spitzer’s plan to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants. Four years later, she ran for Congress in a district that stretches from Buffalo to Rochester. Beating the odds, she won. But this is a new race—and with no public polling data available, it looks like it could go either way.
Can Politics Be a War of Ideas?
The day after his night at the Pushcart, Wu stands addressing the press in front of a Manhattan vocational school, He challenges Cuomo and Hochul to say his name. They won’t acknowledge his existence because standard campaign logic says that the front-runner would only feed long-shot challengers by entering into debate, but for Wu, that’s making a “mockery of this primary process.”
A cynic would call Wu disingenuous, but this almost naive demand for the kind of politics we discover in civics class is central to Wu’s campaign. He sees his run as wide-eyed experiment in American democracy. Can politics ever be a war of ideas?
Much as Thoreau retreated to the solitude of Walden Pond to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” Wu says he’s entered politics to learn what is really there. “I threw myself into this campaign to see what was there in our political system and see how it might work. And if I end up dissatisfied with it or satisfied with it, at least I would know.”
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