In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.
As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who …
In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.
As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.
Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.
Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.
Every page of this book screams -- why didn't I learn all of this already?? Tim Wu does a great job of investigating the history of technology in the United States, and all of the regulatory intricacies.
I'd give this a 5/5 if it had a little more love on the character of all of these personalities. It sometimes reads a bit too much like a history book and so can get hard to follow, but the content is interesting and applicable enough to our current day to be a definite recommended read for anyone interested in the intersection between innovation and government policy.
On my list to reread -- Read this in the form of a somewhat scrambled audio book, due to the bother of working around DRM on an ebook I bought. This provided a delightful frisson as I read the book's accounts of other communication medias being taken over and locked down by corporations.
Anyway, I wish I could get everyone involved with say, Debian or Linux or general online free culture to read this. While it can be a bit of a slog in places, it provides a worldview that makes certain corporate maneuverings and ongoing shifts going on right now look very transparent. (Hello Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.) It shows how people trying to do what we're trying to do have failed, and failed, and failed yet again. This is valuable.
I was not fully convinced by its argument that the internet (and, though it doesn't mention it specifically, …
On my list to reread -- Read this in the form of a somewhat scrambled audio book, due to the bother of working around DRM on an ebook I bought. This provided a delightful frisson as I read the book's accounts of other communication medias being taken over and locked down by corporations.
Anyway, I wish I could get everyone involved with say, Debian or Linux or general online free culture to read this. While it can be a bit of a slog in places, it provides a worldview that makes certain corporate maneuverings and ongoing shifts going on right now look very transparent. (Hello Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.) It shows how people trying to do what we're trying to do have failed, and failed, and failed yet again. This is valuable.
I was not fully convinced by its argument that the internet (and, though it doesn't mention it specifically, free software) is no different than radio, tv, telephone, movies, cable. But, as it points out, the wild-eyed visionary ones always think they have something new and world-changing.
Wu's concluding proposal to prevent the cycle he identifies, was also sadly, not to me very convincing. At least, its prospects look unlikely in the US.
