The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 29, 2011 - Business & Economics - 384 pages

New Yorker and Fortune Best Book of the Year

"A must-read for all Americans who want to remain the ones deciding what they can read, watch, and listen to.” —Arianna Huffington

Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information powers—Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T—Tim Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. 

It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry—from the telephone to radio to film—once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel.

In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of "the master switch"? Here, Tim Wu shows how a battle royale for the Internet’s future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.

 

Contents

Introduction
3
The Disruptive Founder
17
Radio Dreams
33
Mr Vail Is a Big Man
45
The Time Is Not Ripe for Feature Films
61
Centralize All Radio Activities
74
The Paramount Ideal
86
Beneath the AllSeeing Eye
99
The Rebels the Challengers and the Fall
157
Reborn Without a Soul
205
The Internet Against Everyone
255
Father and Son
269
The Separations Principle
301
Acknowledgments
323
Index
358
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and professor at Columbia University, currently serving as Senior Advisor to the United States Federal Trade Commission.  In 2006, he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in the following year, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard’s one hundred most influential graduates. He writes for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes.

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