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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Borzoi Books), by Tim Wu
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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 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.
- Sales Rank: #313667 in Books
- Published on: 2010-11-02
- Released on: 2010-11-02
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.56" h x 1.34" w x 6.67" l, 1.56 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* A veteran of Silicon Valley and professor at Columbia University, Wu is an author and policy advocate best known for coining the term net neutrality. Although the Internet has created a world of openness and access unprecedented in human history, Wu is quick to point out that the early phases of telephony, film, and radio offered similar opportunities for the hobbyist, inventor, and creative individual, only to be centralized and controlled by corporate interests, monopolized, broken into smaller entities, and then reconsolidated. Wu calls this the Cycle, and nowhere is it more exemplary than in the telecommunications industry. The question Wu raises is whether the Internet is different, or whether we are merely in the early open phase of a technology that is to be usurped and controlled by profiteering interests. Central in the power struggle is the difference between the way Apple Computer and Google treat content, with Apple attempting to control the user experience with slick products while Google endeavors to democratize content, giving the user choice and openness. This is an essential look at the directions that personal computing could be headed depending on which policies and worldviews come to dominate control over the Internet. --David Siegfried
Review
Praise for Tim Wu’s THE MASTER SWITCH
“An explosive history that makes it clear how the information business became what it is today. Important reading.”
—Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More and Free: How
Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing; editor of Wired Magazine
“Wu’s book is both a masterful media history and an outline for the future of the digital age. The Master Switch brilliantly describes the never-ending tension between open and closed media, as it has effected everything from the printing press to the web, and details ways society might be able to prevent the disastrous closing down of digital freedoms currently threatening the open internet.”
—Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization and Cognitive
Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
“Every now and then a book changes the way we understand the world. The Master Switch is such an achievement; it is a rigorous, imaginative and enthralling history of the Twentieth Century struggle among utopian innovators, profit-maximizing monopolists, and their often-hapless regulators. Wu has convincingly reinterpreted our media past, and by doing so, he has illuminated the risks to open media and Internet-enabled innovation that confront us in the present.”
—Steve Coll, President, New American Foundation and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Ghost Wars: The Secret
History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
“A masterpiece.”
—Lawrence Lessig, Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics and Professor of Law, Harvard
University
“Ranging from the early days of Theodore Vail’s AT&T to the current battle between Google and Apple, Tim Wu’s work is a must read for those who want to know about the future of the Internet. The Master Switch is brilliant, with a distinctive voice that comes through on every page.”
—Josh Silverman, CEO, Skype
“A free and open Internet is not a given. Indeed, corporate interests are working feverishly to seize control of it. Drawing on history, The Master Switch shows how this could easily happen and why we are at risk of losing the freedom we now take for granted. A must-read for all Americans who want to remain the ones deciding what they can read, watch, and listen to.”
—Arianna Huffington
“The Master Switch [is] my pick for economics book of the year.”
—Ezra Klein, The Washington Post
“[A]n intellectually ambitious history of modern communications.... Wu makes a good case [and] his most thought-provoking argument about the future may actually be the past.”
—David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review
“[T]here’s sharp insight and a surprising fact on nearly every page of Wu’s masterful survey.... entertaining.”
—Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe
“[A] brilliant exploration of the oscillations of communications technologies between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ from the early days of telephone up through Hollywood and broadcast television up to the Internet era.”
—Michael Noer, Forbes
“[O]riginal, insightful...Wu skillfully evocates the early years of telephony.... he provides a compelling reminder of the monopolist instincts of communications and media companies.”
—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Monthly
“[M]asterful.... fascinating.... a superstar in the telecommunications world.... Wu has a way of presenting complex and important concepts in a clear and understandable way....eminently readable....a wealth of....fabulous anecdotes....a warning that we ignore at our peril.”
—Art Brodsky, Huffington Post
“[G]roundbreaking.... The Master Switch offers powerful lessons from the past for the future of the Internet.”
—Li Gong, Nature
“[T]imely.... a PW Best Book of 2010.... The Master Switch is a fascinating look at the cycle of technology and media development over the past century, and implications for the future.”
—Andrew Richard Albanese, Publisher’s Weekly
“Wu…artfully charts a single story in which economic power consistently trumps public good, with the Google of today being the latest ‘master switch’ that channels communication….Eye-opening reading, with implications for just about anyone who uses that utility, which means just about everyone.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Wu’s engaging narrative and remarkable historical detail make this a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity...in the information age.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review and ‘pick of the week’)
“Eye-opening business history.... Wu is an exemplary writer...able to draw readers into his stories with engaging details.”
—Library Journal
“[A]n essential look at the directions that personal computing could be headed depending on which policies and worldviews come to dominate control over the Internet.”
—David Siegfried, Booklist (starred review)
“The Master Switch....a brilliant explanation and history....is as fascinating, wide-ranging, and, ultimately, inspiring book about communications policy and the information industries as you could hope to find.... Wu’s great strength is in the breadth of his scholarship an din his ability to use humor, clear language, and innovative arguments to connect diverse ideas.... Wu is that rare animal, an accomplished scholar who can write about complex ideas in ways that are accessible to all. And the ideas he’s covering are as important as any in our ideological marketplace today.”
—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Don't think the Internet is going to be this way forever...
By Rick Williams
Wide eyed and wiser for the read. The "Cycle" of decentralized and centralized information industry history sounds like it could be dry. But this book blew my mind. I had no idea the early days of radio looked much like our internet today. A multitude of hobbyists (bloggers) and businesses used it in a freewheeling way, until megalomaniacs in govnt and big biz rounded it up into NBC and CBS and made it illegal to broadcast if you weren't them. Same for film and TV.
This book tells the story of the consolidation of new inventions that impact our world in the hands of a few people who have their finger on a master switch of sorts.
Master Switch argues that the internet age is not so different from the age of the telegraph (they were working on a way to get "texting" machines into every home before radio hit!) or radio, or Hollywood, or Television, or cable TV.
The story is the same. A new disruptive technology comes along, and people with big lawyers and big world changing monopolist visions usurp it from small operators and inventors. Patent stealing, inventor scamming, government policy manipulation, and big law are used as levers to hoist new technology onto monopolist mounds of media conglomeration.
As a result we get stifling, repression of cool new inventions. Television, invented in 1929, doesn't see the light of day until 1939 and is totally usurped by the radio kingpins by 1949. AT&T invents the magnetic drive, answering machine, optical cable (breakthroughs we associate with the past 30 years) in 1930! But because these would cannibalize their core business, we had to wait until the breakup of MaBell in the 70's and 80's to see hard drives, high-speed internet, and answering machines...50 years after they were invented. It all just sat in Bell Labs R&D. They were a monopoly. And that is the story of the book. It squeezed-to-death what vestiges of naivete I had for the internet age freedoms we apparently enjoy today. I now understand Net neutrality. and the "cycle" of consolidation that is in play right now.
I now understand AT&T's evil plans against Google. And Googles evil plans against AT&T.
One owns the wires and can flip the master switch in collusion with the govn't. One owns the mind share of the citizenry and can manipulate perception with it's master switch much the way TV has influence culture before cable. AT&T owns the wires of the internet, Google owns our intentions via search. Will they decentralize? Will they become bigger monopolies?
Great book to read to get your head around whether or not the internet will go the way of all information industries before it.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Somewhat Disappointed
By J. Duncan
I had really looked forward to this given all the positives, and associations with all-time classics like Postman's "Technopoly". Unfortunately I was mostly underwhelmed, and left disappointed. The central theme is the interplay between centralized models (in the extreme a vertically integrated monopoly), versus decentralized, free market competition....with the former as one might imagine being the bad guy. (Oddly however for most of the book, the author seems unsure if centralized monopoly or decentralized competition is best for media and communications industries (including content), often citing exceptions to positives and negatives of both.)
The first 2/3rds or so of the book are somewhat torturous while building to the last section. The writing is dry, delivering a not very insightful summary of the US media and telco industry. It's central expose' simply stated is that large enterprises co-opt with the government to keep out new disruptive entrants that pose a threat to the existing power structure. Is that really surprising? Is it seriously any great revelation that upstart new entrants argue for competition when taking on a monopoly, and a monopoly argues for better service and public interest to protect itself? Is it shocking that when a new entrant fully succeeds in uprooting the monopoly, it starts acting like one and tries to defend itself by making the same argument of the monopolistic firm it replaced? As the ages old saying in politics goes, 'where you stand is a function of where you sit". Is it really insightful to point out that larger, better capitalized firms use the legal system to starve and delay weaker rivals? More specifically, does the author really think Steven Ross Warner Brothers conglomerate (which he started putting together in the 70's), was the business world's first attempt to lower the risk profile of volatile lines of business by combining them with more stable ones?
It doesn't start getting good until the 3rd to last chapter "A Surprising Wreck", where he puts in context the failed time Warner - AOL merger. Hindsight being 20/20, I probably should have just started reading here. The next chapter "Father and Son" is probably the best, with quality insight on the philosophical differences between Apple co-founders Wozniak (open system) vs Jobs (closed, vertically integrated), and how they define and inform the Book's central theme. His contrasting of Apple and Google is also decent.
But alas the momentum established by the two preceding chapters is quickly extinguished by closing one where the author conveys his policy prescription for guarding against the dangers of private sector concentration/monopoly in the information age. It contained so many leaps of faith, and unimplementable recommendations it was of little value. At the end day what the author may have failed to appreciate are 3 important things about the US system:
- The courts over time generally do a respectable job of breaking up monopolies;
- Innovation and the freer market, tend to root out inefficient biz models;
- Closed and open systems (i.e. Apple and Google) can co-exist, and it becomes more a matter of consumer choice.
But all that criticism aside, Wu does leave one with the impression that states (often acting in concert with large concentrated private entities) will attempt to wrestle control of promising and disruptive information technologies...and for those who didn't get that already, the book thus serves a highly useful purpose.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
A gripping history builds to a compelling warning
By Vlad Buckets
I would highly recommend this book for anyone who has an interest in history, technology, or net neutrality. Since I fall into all three categories, for me, this book read like a gripping, page-turning novel. This 100+ year journey through multiple information industries was quite educational and entertaining, though a clear bias against corporate self-regulation or government sponsored monopolies can be found on nearly every page. Still, I felt the author's position was compellingly built. To take on over a century of history in less than 400 pages is very ambitious, but I was impressed by the level of detail the book went into for the various subjects covered. I do not claim to be an expert on the material, so I cannot comment on the level of misinformation, but the plentiful sources and footnotes adds to the book's credibility. I did find myself on rare occasion saying, "Hmm... I don't think that's quite right."
The only thing I was disappointed by was the relatively brief exploration of modern issues, including net neutrality. I cannot call this a criticism as the book is not marketed as a primer for net neutrality, but I was hoping for a little more content relating to the recent history of the Internet and the important issues to be solved for the future. Even though I tend to side with the author's position, I would agree that a more equal treatment of the other sides of this debate would have strengthened the argument. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent reading through "The Master Switch" and would enthusiastically encourage everyone to give it a look.
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