The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
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"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 You-Tube 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 expose, 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. Publishers Weekly According to Columbia professor and policy advocate Wu (Who Controls the Internet), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium--the “master switch.” Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates “not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach” that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy--those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access--and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a “Separations Principle” would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. Wu’s engaging narrative and remarkable historical detail make this a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity--and necessary deregulation--in the information age. (Nov.)
Introduction 3PART I The Rise 151 The Disruptive Founder 172 Radio Dreams 333 Mr. Vail Is a Big Man 454 The Time Is Not Ripe for Feature Films 615 Centralize All Radio Activities 746 The Paramount Ideal 86PART II Beneath the All-Seeing Eye 997 The Foreign Attachment 1018 The Legion of Decency 1159 FM Radio 12510 We Now Add Sight to Sound 136PART III The Rebels, the Challengers, and the Fall 15711 The Right Kind of Breakup 15912 The Radicalism of the Internet Revolution 16813 Nixon's Cable 17614 Broken Bell 18715 Esperanto for Machines 196PART IV Reborn Without a Soul 20516 Turner Does Television 20717 Mass Production of the Spirit 21718 The Return of AT&T 238PART V The Internet Against Everyone 25519 A Surprising Wreck 25720 Father and Son 26921 The Separations Principle 299Acknowledgments 321Notes 323Index 355
