WASHINGTON— Tim Wu is getting a second chance to change how the government regulates American corporations.

Mr. Wu, a law professor and progressive antitrust leader, is a key architect of the executive order President Biden signed Friday aimed at making U.S. businesses more competitive.

He helped write a similar order in the waning months of the Obama administration, which resulted in a handful of new regulations. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 election, scuttling plans for a broad regulatory push and later repealing some of the new rules.

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President Biden signed an executive order Friday that he says will promote competitive markets by limiting corporate concentration that hurts consumers, workers and small businesses. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Now Mr. Wu is back in the White House as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, and he and other Biden administration officials are picking up where the Obama team left off five years ago.

The executive order gives Mr. Biden’s backing to ideas Mr. Wu has publicly advocated, putting in motion dozens of regulatory initiatives the White House says will help workers and small businesses in markets dominated by large corporations, in industries from technology platforms to airlines to hearing aids.

Mr. Wu, in a paper written after he left the Obama White House to return to Columbia Law School, outlined a strategy for “using industry-specific statutes, rulemakings, or other tools of the regulatory state to achieve the traditional competition goals associated with the antitrust laws.”

Tim Wu ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination as lieutenant governor of New York state in 2014, as the running mate of gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout.

Tim Wu ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination as lieutenant governor of New York state in 2014, as the running mate of gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout.

Photo: brendan mcdermid/Reuters

The White House declined to make Mr. Wu available for an interview. A senior White House official said the executive order matched the president’s campaign commitments to address issues such as prescription drugs, employment contracts and the power of large technology companies.

“We all benefited from [Mr. Wu’s] prior work in this space and the writing that he had done,” the official said. “That’s why the president brought him on as special assistant, is to work on this set of issues. As you can imagine, his vision and work on this was central to the effort.”

Staff work began on the order in earnest after Mr. Wu arrived at the White House in March, as Mr. Wu and others reached out to regulatory agencies to solicit ideas about what to include in the order—and suggested some of their own, the official said.

In 2020, Mr. Wu and other former Obama administration officials called for a new office at the White House that would pressure federal agencies to promote competition. The executive order would create a new competition council, led by the head of the White House National Economic Council, “to coordinate the federal government’s response to the rising power of large corporations in the economy,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Friday’s executive order also tells the Federal Communications Commission to restore net-neutrality rules stopping internet service providers from slowing down certain types of content or traffic. Such rules were adopted under the Obama administration but repealed under Mr. Trump.

The five-member FCC is currently divided between two Democrats and two Republicans, with one vacancy yet to be filled.

Early on in his academic career, Mr. Wu was credited with coining the term net neutrality as he wrote papers warning about broadband providers discriminating between different types of internet traffic.

Mr. Wu’s views aren’t shared by many industry executives.

“We are disappointed that the Executive Order rehashes misleading claims about the broadband marketplace, including the tired and disproven assertion that ISPs would block or throttle consumers from accessing the internet content of their choice,” the trade group NCTA - The Internet & Television Association, which represents internet service providers, said Friday.

More recently, Mr. Wu has been among the most active and prominent members in a growing intellectual movement that argues U.S. policy makers have failed to adequately enforce antitrust laws, allowing large corporations to accumulate too much power over both commerce and politics.

In a 2018 book, “The Curse of Bigness,” he argued the U.S. was in a new Gilded Age where unrestricted economic concentration was increasing income inequality, and threatening democracy itself. “The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public,” he wrote.

Mr. Wu carried copies of the book to a 2019 congressional hearing on antitrust policy in the technology sector, and handed one to a reporter after his testimony.

Mr. Wu’s critics dispute both his policy prescriptions and the premise that the economy is increasingly consolidated.

They say that the prevailing approach to antitrust law, focused on potential harm to consumers rather than a company’s size or an industry’s level of concentration, is more likely to yield positive economic results.

Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that takes funding from corporations and nonprofit groups, said large companies bring with them consumer benefits, such as a large airline that can coordinate flights between a range of destinations.

By seeking to reduce large companies’ market share, he said, “the risk is that you would end up making companies that have valid economies of scale and scope and other benefits of size—you would start to diminish that.”

Mr. Wu has also dabbled in politics, mounting an unsuccessful 2014 New York campaign for the Democratic nomination as lieutenant governor of New York, as the running mate of gubernatorial candidate Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law School professor.

One of their campaign staffers was Lina Khan, another critic of the recent U.S. approach to antitrust policy who is now chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Khan and Mr. Wu briefly worked together at Columbia Law School before taking their current jobs.

On Friday, the White House executive order encouraged Ms. Khan to adopt a number of new regulations that are in line with ideas she had espoused before her appointment to the FTC, including rules for internet marketplaces, employment contracts and data collection by large technology platforms.

Mr. Wu earned degrees from McGill University and Harvard Law School and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer before taking a series of academic and government posts.

Write to Ryan Tracy at ryan.tracy@wsj.com