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The Master Switch
Tim Wu
The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
Random House Inc
November 2010
On Sale: November 2, 2010
384 pages
ISBN: 0307269930
EAN: 9780307269935
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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