AEJMC San Francisco Conference keynote speaker, Tim Wu, will address the sharing of internet access and the threat to democracy from corporate interests, including media companies, too closely aligned with government.

Tim Wu is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.  Wu is a scholar of the media and technology industries, specializing in antitrust, copyright, and telecommunications law. He is famous for coining the phrase "net neutrality" in his paper New Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination. Wu has argued that in an ideal world either competition or enlightened self-interest would cause drive carriers to design neutral networks. But it's not an ideal world and Wu was prominent in pushing the 2010 passage of a federal rule requiring Internet service providers and governments to treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially.His book Master Switch was named among the best books of 2010 by The New Yorker magazine, Fortune magazine, and Publishers Weekly.  In 2013, Wu was named to the National Law Journal's "America's 100 Most Influential Lawyers."

From 2011 to 2012, Wu served as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission.  He has appeared on the television programs The Colbert Report and Charlie Rose.  In October 2014, he was featured in Killswitch, a film also featuring Lawrence Lessig, Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden, premiering at the Woodstock Film Festival.  Wu ran unsuccessfully in the 2014 Democratic primary for lieutenant governor of New York.

The Keynote Session is scheduled for Thursday, August 6, at 6:45 p.m. 

The keynote session will be followed by a reception open to all 

conference delegates.