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The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Tim Wu (Goodreads Author)

3.86 · Rating details · 7,222 ratings · 427 reviews

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 wi 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. ...more

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Hardcover, 384 pages

Published November 2nd 2010 by Knopf (first published 2010)

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Sep 07, 2010 Tim Wu rated it it was amazing · (Review from the author)

I learned a tonne writing it

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Nov 22, 2019 Mario the lone bookwolf rated it really liked it

Shelves: wu-tim, 0-technology, 0-internet

I believed in the power and existence of the master switch long before the publishing of this book, because many future timelines by many famous Sci-Fi authors point in this direction and because it is a logical and to a certain extent necessary step for both government and industry.

We are not at the end of history, but probably at the end of new ways to control the information highways. Augmented reality, virtual reality and invasive techniques to participate better and more efficient all won I believed in the power and existence of the master switch long before the publishing of this book, because many future timelines by many famous Sci-Fi authors point in this direction and because it is a logical and to a certain extent necessary step for both government and industry.

We are not at the end of history, but probably at the end of new ways to control the information highways. Augmented reality, virtual reality and invasive techniques to participate better and more efficient all won´t change the fact that there will always be an underlying network, internet, LAN, intelligent tree roots or whatever that connect the participants. There will be standards and competitors and the best product will be used by most customers.

One can argue if it is good or bad if all this power lies in the hands of a few people, but in a democratic state the control of all content to avoid extremism up to a dictatorship is something simply necessary and the line between too much and too less censorship is so thin and difficult to draw that it may be good that machines will do the job. Probably they are more objective and less prone do party principles and so the endless circle of corruption between lobbyists, government and dominating industries will go on forever even more efficient.

Former industries fell because they are, compared to today's standard, inflexible and unilateral, not so say boring. Just radio, just a rigid TV program, just an offline PC game, come on. Not as if TV- and radio stations, news corporations, etc. would learn from the past and try to modernize themselves. Even if they would really want to, they would have to cannibalize themselves, because their push media program without active user participation is oldfashioned. If they would change, the whole subvention circle and political interests in official, state-owned propaganda stations would collapse and the information monopoly would have to be reconsidered. They would have to allow active evaluation by users and let people produce critical, true content, to them better-known as fake news. Pest or cholera, they lose whatever they do.

And there are antitrust laws, the youth has the best potential to connect and act together, old ideas become more and more ridiculous and pathetic and the human participation in important decisions becomes less and less. And for me, as a friendly technocratic science adorer, this ist the most important point. Automate everything and if someone has a problem with it, give her/him a history book.

Sure there are some ideas to democratize the whole internet, open-source, sharing economy, creative commons, etc. But a national and global standard, infrastructure and supervisory authority will always be needed to let the whole system run and fix problems. I am a proponent of democratic and social innovations and a fairer economic system, but I also see the importance of a master administrator with different kill switches.

And one must be realistic, each free and great idea gets commercialized in a certain amount of time and the only viable option is to make the best compromise between civil society and big money. Net neutrality and transparency must be prioritized with the help of techniques like open government and blockchain technology or the worst possible moloch, as seen in China, may arise. An indestructible super behemoth, with tentacles like an app as WeChat https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat
that combines the worst mixture of totalitarian and turbocapitalistic ideas together and forces everyone to use it for daily life.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this, yuck, ugh, boo, completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technol...
...more

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Nov 02, 2010 Elaine Nelson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, economics, history, favorites, technology, politics

As with Nothing to Envy, I should have written this review right after reading the book. It was fantastic, and I'd like to read it again. Great history of the "Information Empires" of the 20th and early 21st century, the continuing tension between openness and control. The history of television seemed particularly instructive: there was no early era of openness; instead Sarnoff (RCA/NBC) manipulated everything he could to make sure that it came out under the exact same control as radio at the ti ...more

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May 25, 2018 Manu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: review

Wow!
Two of my favourite books in the recent past have been The Moral Animal and The Sovereign Individual. I liked them because they brought out the fundamental patterns that underlie the evolution and behaviour of humans and the system of the world respectively. The Master Switch does the same with communication and information empires.
His premise is this - history has shown that communication/information technologies follow a predictable path : it starts as an idea in a mind/group of minds ty Wow!
Two of my favourite books in the recent past have been The Moral Animal and The Sovereign Individual. I liked them because they brought out the fundamental patterns that underlie the evolution and behaviour of humans and the system of the world respectively. The Master Switch does the same with communication and information empires.
His premise is this - history has shown that communication/information technologies follow a predictable path : it starts as an idea in a mind/group of minds typically in a small room, is then brought to life in the most rudimentary manner, and keeps itself open to improvements and changes until it becomes a solid proposition. It then shifts to industrial scale, predictable outputs, and controlled by a corporation which then decides to make it a closed system. He calls this the Cycle.
The author's contention is that all information businesses go through the cycle. The question he seeks to answer is "which is mightier : the radicalism of the Internet or the inevitability of the Cycle?" He gets there by taking us through the history of information empires.
The story begins in the 1870s, when Alexander Graham Bell's small telephone company goes up against the ruler of the times - Western Union. A classic underdog story that resulted in the continuing empire that is called AT&T. Is At&T still the hero? Will get to that in a bit. Similar stories with its own heroes and villains then play across radio (AM & FM), television, movies and now, the internet.
It is not just the magnificent scope that makes the book interesting. The author retells history in the mould of a thriller! There are anecdotes and (not so) trivia that make the book really engaging. Multiple inventors of the same technology (and uncredited firsts), towering personalities from JP Morgan to Steve Jobs who left a firm imprint, fascinating origin stories of movie studios like Universal and Warner that are now household names and how movie making is now less to do with the movie and more to do with the business of the franchise (a movie is a 2 hour advertisement of an intellectual property which makes money through a franchise that sells everything from tshirts to DVDs to theme parks), companies that rise again like phoenixes in revenge arcs that span a century (GE buying Universal)!
The author obviously does not give a definitive answer to whether the Internet will beat the Cycle. He suggests a constitutional approach (not regulatory) and a “Separations Principle” to make sure that the ownership of information creation, distribution (networks, infrastructure) and access control remains with different parties to prevent it from corporate or governmental misuse. The nuance he highlights is that the monopoly actually begins and even continues with noble intentions and utopian values, but loses the plot subsequently. Almost like "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." (Remember the question earlier about AT&T)
He also points out (and this is where it meets The Sovereign Individual) that the user has the power to control how this plays out - "Habits shape markets far more powerfully than laws".
A fantastic read on multiple counts! ...more

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Dec 06, 2019 Mehrsa rated it it was amazing

I started this a while back, got half way, and then moved on to his other books. So I started it again and read it all the way through and I'm so glad I did. This book is a fascinating history of monopoly power--how it was built and how it shaped modern media, the internet, AT&T, etc. It's just as relevant now as when it was written. ...more

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Nov 05, 2010 Irina slutsky is currently reading it

by Irina Slutsky
http://adage.com/digital/article?arti...
SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- Regular readers of Ad Age know that the companies that control the internet are, if not obsessed, then very concerned with the topic of network neutrality. Most recently Google and Verizon were the two giants rumored to have a plan to let users pay for faster access. "We already had the payola battle in radio, now this is the payola battle of the internet," said Tim Wu, the man who coined the term "network neutr ...more

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Jun 23, 2017 Mahendra Palsule rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An important book and a must-read for policy makers and those who value freedom of expression and net neutrality.

Most of the book is devoted to tracing the history of information industries in the US - telephone, radio, tv, and film. Tim convincingly describes how each industry inevitably goes through a cycle - oscillating between an open, decentralized network and a closed, centralized one. Some of the historic episodes were quite shocking to me. Most prominent among those were learning how the ...more

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Sep 06, 2019 Zaphirenia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I enjoyed this book very much. All this information about the... information industry was enlightening and really useful for understanding how the world of technology and media has developed and is still developing. From a European standpoint, the conclusion in the end, the "separations principle" proposal, seems a bit like wishful thinking but nevertheless the book is very engaging, well-written and kept me constantly craving to learn more.

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Nov 26, 2010 Tiffany Conner rated it really liked it

I happened upon this book after listening to NPR's On the Media. I had never heard of Tim Wu before. Now, I am eager to go back and find some of his Slate articles. Though Wu is a law professor this book is not a dense, arcane, dry book of legalese. The writing is brisk, intelligent, and challenging. The Master Switch is accessible, informative, and very engaging. Mr. Wu has written a very timely book about the history and power of communication and information industries in this country. What w ...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Fredrik rated it it was ok

a number of things sets this book back badly:

* it deals only with the us (with the exception of a few pages on the bbc), thus the "empires" amounts to at most nation-wide corporations within one country
* too restricted in time; only deals with the birth of telephony and onwards (what about telegraphy, the semaphor system deployed in france etc?)
* the author invents a vaguely described Cycle to describe the phases, as he sees them, of the rise and fall of corporations operating in the information ...more

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Nov 08, 2010 Nick Black rated it liked it

Shelves: likely-reread, read-multiple-times, gave-up-too-boring

about what you'd expect from the five chapters excerpted onto slate.com: swashbuckling profiles of masscomm's elder founders, fascinating people all (theodore vail of bell and adolph zukor of paramount particularly, and of course alexander graham), fawning over Apple (though he takes a refreshingly stark stance on the grim hegemony and clockwork control of an Apple-dominated future), blatant oversights with regard to historical philosophy (capitalized "Cycle" used throughout, but not a word of h ...more

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Sep 15, 2012 Nilesh rated it really liked it

Shelves: good-non-fiction

There is an innate tendency in all of us to extrapolate from history, and often quite ridiculously. With the maxims like "those who do not know history, are condemned to repeat it", so many times these days, people overuse historical analysis. This book is a great recount of what happened before, but falls prey to heeding to history too closely.

"So many experts have this time is different written on their tombstone" is another proverb found everywhere. One should certainly believe in long cycles There is an innate tendency in all of us to extrapolate from history, and often quite ridiculously. With the maxims like "those who do not know history, are condemned to repeat it", so many times these days, people overuse historical analysis. This book is a great recount of what happened before, but falls prey to heeding to history too closely.

"So many experts have this time is different written on their tombstone" is another proverb found everywhere. One should certainly believe in long cycles of history but one must also realize that everything in human life has also had a first. There is no point in abandoning logic in the name of historical analysis. Particularly when cycles are spotted based on three or four major events and for things and era as dissimilar as one talked here.

The book is extremely interesting and full of new things when it talks about the evolution of the US media/telecom/network (broadly telecommunication) industry since the first days of the telephony. The early monopolies, their abuse of power, the invention of radio/TV/cable TV, the birth of hollywood studios and media companies etc are all beautifully lined up in a nice story with a handful of interesting characters.

The book fails as it reaches the Internet era and tries to draw a conclusion. Google is good and Apple is bad appears a preconceived bias. Apple as a new AT&T almost ignores what has happened to almost every giant in the space in the last four decades starting from IBM to Microsoft to Intel and with dozens of others like Motorola, HP, Dell, Oracle, Sony, Nokia, Cisco, AOL etc. All of them appeared mightily powerful for a while but unlike what happened previously with other transformative technologies, this era has been different.

This does not mean there won't be control. There will surely be. But, it just can not be as heavy as AT&T era. And we are still in the second decade of Internet, more like telephones before the end of the nineteenth century. There is a lot more to go. Who knows, even Apple and/or Google may not appear more powerful than Yahoo or Microsoft of today by the time the decade is over. If there is anyone to worry about, they are not exactly corporate monopolies.

All that said, the book by itself is informative and interesting. ...more

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Jun 27, 2018 Brendan Holly rated it it was amazing

Probably this is too high of a rating, but about 1/3 of the way in I realized just how ignorant I was about the history of information technologies in the past century. I was fascinated by the intertwining histories presented in this book, most intensely by the public/private AT&T monopoly - a word which fails to capture the awesome power of AT&T for the first 3/4 of the 20th century. Of course, in 2018 The Master Switch is both anachronistic and prescient as we await the consequences of the FCC ...more

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May 31, 2013 Jayesh rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

The historical detail, especially in the first half, is extremely endearing and convincingly shadows the current state of information age. Be it the monopolistic behavior of corporate giants or importance of patents or keeping the government on your sides, things really do appear to repeat themselves.

The book sort of petered out coming to the present internet age. Wu (although quite understandably) is clearly biased a lot towards Google, seeing it as almost the only force of good, about which I ...more

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Jan 17, 2017 Vikas Erraballi rated it it was amazing

A historical analysis of 20th/21st century 'information industries' (telephone, radio, TV and film) attempting (successfully IMO) to identify patterns in their emergence/evolution and the consequences/implications of those patterns to US culture and politics.

Behind the analysis is a question of whether the internet industry will evolve similarly. Wu uses Schumpeter's theory of creative-destruction as a foil to highlight all the ways government can (and has) intervened to contradict the outcomes ...more

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Nov 13, 2014 Hashin Jithu rated it it was amazing

A great read for those who are interested in understanding the historical background of the huge information empires today. It carefully analyses the rise and fall of the information empires of the past and Tim Wu comes up with am interesting explanation of cyclic changes present in the industry. He dissect all major information empires of the twentieth century and the early twenty first century and argues on how his pattern fits in the changing world.

A must read for all those who are interested ...more

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Aug 12, 2015 Kevin Gross rated it liked it

I found this book an interesting survey of the business undercurrents and politics surrounding and supporting the rise of various public information technologies, including telephones, film, radio, TV, and the Internet. From other sources, we hear frequently about the inventors like Alexander Bell and Phil Farnsworth, as well as others whose association with innovation is frequently overblown and misrepresented, like David Sarnoff. The author does a good, readable job of describing the world int ...more

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May 23, 2018 Lenny D rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

In the very last line of The Master Switch, Tim Wu's magisterial argument about the nature of information systems, the author catalyzes the argument he’s just spent 300 pages making, largely from a historian’s perspective, with a jarring statement about the future:

Our dependence on smartphones, tablets, and other devices has delivered us to a moment when our insatiable demand for bandwidth left us vulnerable. Let us, then, not fail to protect ourselves from the will of all who might seek dominat

...more

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Jun 22, 2018 Myles rated it liked it

Shelves: economic-history, us-history, technology, communications, science-history-of

It is the summer of 2018. We have the now approved merger of AT&T and Time-Warner in the US. As well, Apple’s Chinese iCloud service will move to a state-controlled data centre which will in all likelihood be monitored by the Chinese government.

I thought it a good time to revisit Tim Wu’s 2010 classic “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” as a backdrop to new information monopolies such as Google and facebook, and to look at the AT&T merger under the lens of an earlier bo ...more

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Sep 22, 2018 Ashwin Chhabria rated it really liked it

In the book Master Switch, Tim Wu details the history of the US tech industry discussing the inventions of telegraph, radio, television and the internet with several case studies.

Learnings:

1. Government interventions can disrupt natural growth and innovation- New technologies don’t always result out of free playing forces of the market. The entry of television was delayed by intention (so the radio could have an extended period of profit). The US government supported Bell Labs/AT&T for the longe In the book Master Switch, Tim Wu details the history of the US tech industry discussing the inventions of telegraph, radio, television and the internet with several case studies.

Learnings:

1. Government interventions can disrupt natural growth and innovation- New technologies don’t always result out of free playing forces of the market. The entry of television was delayed by intention (so the radio could have an extended period of profit). The US government supported Bell Labs/AT&T for the longest time in wading off competition and ensuring that the market was monopolized (so they could have access to public data among other reasons). Things would have been a lot more different if the government did not orchestrate scenarios with a desired target in mind. Things would have been different if the laissez faire approach played out. The “government’s only proper role,” Wu concludes, “is as a check on private power, never as an aid to it.

2. The internet is heading into one of Open or closed systems- Tim Wu is certain that the internet will take form and shape into one of Open or Closed systems in the coming years. Google’s long-term fondness for keeping the internet open and welcoming (where the net is neutral) versus AT&T and Apple’s predilection to keep it closed (anti net-neutrality) will play out its eventualities in the near future. The cost of keeping the internet open and free is a lot of deregulated junk and phony content while the cost of keeping the internet closed is increased costs, scope to manipulate global information and increased power in the hands of telecom companies. Wu is all for regulated openness and against banning net neutrality. He calls for a separation policy- Those who “develop information (eg. Facebook), those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels(eg. AT&T, Airtel), and those who control the tools or venues of access (eg. Apple) must be kept apart from one another,” Wu writes. He stresses on the need for telecom networks to remain free from the favoritism of the network owners.

3. Cycles- Tim Wu identifies a recurring cycle in the evolution of all technologies(radio, television, movies, and now, the internet) that he identifies as almost inevitable. Each started out as open, chaotic, diverse and intensely creative; each stimulated utopian visions of the future, but in the end they all wound up “captured” by industrial interests. ...more

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Jul 02, 2019 Mauricio rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-i-already-own-to-read-2019

Tales of disruptive innovation in information industries backed by historical facts and academic theory.

The author theorizes that information empires go through a cycle that usually leads to monopolies. He uses the telephone, cinema, radio and television in order to raise the question whether internet will go through the same path.

For me, the most interesting part was to see all the power plays that went behind the scenes and ended up shaping our relationship with communication, entertainment a ...more

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Apr 04, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, politics, read-in-2012, science, economics

This book is divided into two parts: the first 300 pages, which is a high-level history of how a common cycle of innovation and monopolization has manifested itself in various communication/information industries like radio, movies, television, telephone, cable TV, and the internet. Then there's the last chapter, which is Wu's What Is To Be Done? moment where he suggests a possible regulatory regime that will protect the public interest in these network technologies while still allowing for suff This book is divided into two parts: the first 300 pages, which is a high-level history of how a common cycle of innovation and monopolization has manifested itself in various communication/information industries like radio, movies, television, telephone, cable TV, and the internet. Then there's the last chapter, which is Wu's What Is To Be Done? moment where he suggests a possible regulatory regime that will protect the public interest in these network technologies while still allowing for sufficient innovation and invention.

The history section is about as good as you could expect with such a broad range of industries to cover, with plenty of interesting details about the inventors, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who have battled over control of what we now regard as public infrastructure nearly as essential as roads or sewage. He identifies what he calls the Cycle, common to all network technologies since the telegraph, whereby a small-time inventor comes up with a new gadget that allows people to consume or distribute information (it could be multiple inventors - simultaneous inventions are surprisingly frequent, and the difference in success and fame between an Alexander Bell and an Elisha Grey is often as much a matter of luck or corporate backing as technological merits), threatens an established interest with a stake in an old communications paradigm, and makes the steady climb from plucky underdog to overbearing behemoth until the next game-changing inventor comes from nowhere to challenge the incumbent and start the whole process over again.

Since a large part of my professional career has involved AT&T in one way or another I was anxious to read the story of one of the largest and most entrenched monopolies of all time. Wu delivered an abbreviated but still fascinating account of how what used to be just another company came to be The Phone Company, its quest for "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" on the one hand underwriting the tremendous research of Bell Labs and on the other consolidating more power over people's ability to communicate with each other than any company in history. He also gave great overviews of the stories of companies in the other industries; I particularly enjoyed the sections on the vicious struggles in the movie industry, and though he didn't make the parallels to the modern video game industry that I've discussed with friends in the business it's a great exposition of the nature of cartels and how they can impose censorship as bad or worse as that of a government. All told, the historical part of the book is great, and very convincing in its suggestions that all these related technologies are in some sense destined to undergo Schumpeterian cycles of innovation, disruption, consolidation, and stagnation as new business models supplant old ones.

The controversial part, though, is the final chapter with Wu's attempts to outline how we can protect ourselves from monopolies while still enjoying the fruits of companies which would very much like to be monopolies someday. Designing a good regulatory regime is a classic attempt to square the circle, and Wu himself comes up with many examples in the first part of the book how various agencies like the FCC have been co-opted to serve the interests of the businesses they were supposed to be restraining. Since this problem is of course hardly unique to the telecom industry, it's not really surprising that he ends up proposing a tripartite Separations Principle that's more akin to inflexible rule-based proposals (e.g. a discarded plan in drafts of the Dodd-Frank Act to simply place hard caps on the size of large banks) than discretionary agency-based proposals (e.g. an actual provision in the Dodd-Frank Act to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police bank actions).

The first part is temporal separation, which means to restrain established players in an industry from devouring infant entrants, as in the Justice Department's battle to prevent Microsoft from crushing Netscape by using the incumbent advantages of Internet Explorer. The second is functional separation, and he gives the example of preventing movie studios from directly owning the theaters that show their films. The third is regulatory separation, which he defines as removing the potential for regulatory capture by giving the government the power only to check private actors, never to aid them. It should go without saying that in the brief form in the book, this Principle seems at a glance to be hopelessly vague and unworkable; let's use Google as an example. What kind of neutral standard would allow for Google to integrate its Android operating system and Chrome browser with its Google TV platform yet forbid AT&T to give affiliated content higher bandwidth priority on its uVerse internet service (i.e. the opposite of net neutrality)? Similarly, a rule to restrict the ability of Disney to morph into the vast entertainment conglomerate it is today would surely also hamper Google's ability to purchase products like Maps or YouTube. And what kind of "check, not aid" actions, if any, should the government take in situations like Google's copyright struggles with publishers over its attempts to broaden its Google Books database?

I'm skeptical that Wu's admirably clear principles could be simply turned into a working and beneficial regulatory scheme. This isn't really his fault given the size of the book compared to the daunting complexity of modern corporations and the fluid nature of boundaries in network technologies, but it's disappointing that such a perceptive critic of monopoly power proposed such underwhelming solutions. He should write a longer book on that subject; I would eagerly read it. ...more

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Dec 10, 2012 David Dinaburg rated it really liked it

Radio, television, cinema, telephone, internet. If you have any interest in the industrial or technical history of information industries, The Master Switch is highly recommended.

More than anything else, the preceding chapters chronicle the corrupting effects of vertically integrated power. A strong stake in more than one layer of the industry leaves a firm in a position of inherent conflict of interest. You cannot serve two masters, and the objectives of creating information are often at odds

Radio, television, cinema, telephone, internet. If you have any interest in the industrial or technical history of information industries, The Master Switch is highly recommended.

More than anything else, the preceding chapters chronicle the corrupting effects of vertically integrated power. A strong stake in more than one layer of the industry leaves a firm in a position of inherent conflict of interest. You cannot serve two masters, and the objectives of creating information are often at odds with those of disseminating it.

That statement is supported with hundreds of pages of fascinating examples, ranging from Paramount to NBC, AOL to CNN. The unifying thread—and exhibit par excellence—is Bell Communications and their control over America's long distance lines. Bell, and the multitude of titles it has adopted or been forced into over the past century plus, most recognizably AT&T, has perhaps the most interesting history I have ever heard concerning a business entity.

I don’t know if most people have formed a concrete distinction between the information industry and an industry like, say, the automobile industry. The Master Switch carves out a clear distinction and never allows the reader to forget the importance of not treating information dissemination and communications the same way as manufacturing:

...[s]ince antiquity, certain functions have been recognized by the state as being essential to the economy and commerce and therefore necessarily subject to nondiscriminatory policies. For such firms, also described as “public callings,” freedom and opportunity for profit come with responsibility as well. In the American Information industries, such duties were first imputed to the telegraph and telephone companies by the Taft administration in 1910; once it is recognized that a network has passed from a novelty to a necessity, the ancient justifications for common carriage reappear, even if under different names.

The historical details continue with a sentiment common to other past-facing books discussing networks; each time communications technology leaps forward, utopian idealists proclaim it to be the answer to the world’s ailments:

There was even, perhaps unexpectedly for an electronic medium, hope for the elevation of verbal discourse. “There is no doubt whatever that radio broadcasting will tend to improve the caliber of speeches delivered at the average political meeting,” read a column from the 1920s in Radio Broadcast.

However, there is an undercurrent throughout The Master Switch that the internet is not per se different from any other advance in communications technology, from telegraph on upwards; even its particular brand of extreme decentralization cannot stave off the “walled garden” model pounding at the gate, though it seemed to be the deciding factor in scuttling the AOL-Time Warner merger. The internet seems to be inexorably marching toward the next step in what author Tim Wu has dubbed ‘the cycle’: “...when we look closely at the twentieth century, we soon find that the internet wasn’t the first information technology supposed to have changed everything forever. We see in fact a succession of optimistic and open media, each of which, in time, became a closed and controlled industry...”

Theories of how to halt encroachment of industrial conglomerates into the decentralized and open internet are expounded late in the book. It is in my opinion fantastic that the author, typically credited with coining the term “net neutrality,” spent a year advising the Federal Trade Commission, and I can completely understand if that appointment was based mostly off the strength of The Master Switch. “The American political system is designed to prevent abuses of public power. But where it has proved less vigilant is in those areas where the political meets the economic realm, where private economic power comes to bear on public life.

There is so much more to recommend about The Master Switch and no review could hope to encompass what will resonate with a reader. Personally, the industrial history of Bell was absolutely the most interesting, and most detailed, facet of the book. AT&T was sundered via antitrust laws into Southwestern Bell, BellSouth, and all the rest, and yet reformed itself back into the nation’s largest telecommunications conglomerate, even donning the mantle and title of the old AT&T. The parts of that broken trust that didn’t merge back into AT&T became Verizon. “...and like the late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire—Verizon and AT&T.” Un. Real.

There is no way to know what is going to happen with the internet, but The Master Switch will assist a reader in understanding the historical context of telecommunications. It will help you form an opinion when you see a corporate link between, say, Google and Verizon:

Google’s close relationship with Verizon—its first friendship with a Bell—is hard to interpret. Eric Schmidt and Google believe they are converting Verizon to the side of openness and sundering the Bell Empire for good. But we’ve heard that before, and it is not completely clear who is converting whom. Verizon/Google makes for a powerful vertical combination. Verizon, formerly known as Bell Atlantic, is a seasoned monopolist, having held parts of its domain since the capitulation of Western Union in the 1870s. And so it may be Google that is learning from the master.

We shall see. ...more

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Apr 23, 2019 Robert rated it really liked it

Really excellent examination of the history of information monopolies, with some incredible insights on the process. I'm not sure I agree with Wu's idea of a 'Cycle' and his suggestion that the new monopolists are more benevolent seems laughable in 2019, but this is a great book nonetheless and contains some very worthy ideas regarding regulation and how information monopolies differ from others.

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Aug 26, 2017 Amith rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The book traces the power struggles in the American information industry from the age of the internet dominated by Google, Facebook and Apple all the way to the age of the telegraph where Western Union dominated the scene.

The book, a lot more interesting than I expected, reads like a legal thriller most of the time than a non-fiction. At 320 pages, it is not big but still packed with information- cycles of birth and death of information empires and their influence on American politics. In the l ...more

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Apr 18, 2018 Darnell rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

Compared to The Attention Merchants, this one leans heavier on describing a theory and recommending specific political changes. This isn't all bad, necessarily, but it doesn't age as well as the sections exploring specific corners of history. Fortunately, there are still plenty of those, and the book provides some useful ideas overall.

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May 09, 2020 Jle Mail rated it it was amazing

It took me forever to read this book. Its very dense - lots of starting and stopping. But very rewarding. Its a lot of history of media and telecom in the US, a good introduction to who is making money off your attention span and how they are regulated.

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Aug 31, 2019 Paweł Rusin rated it it was amazing

Much better than expected, packed with information. I learned a lot about the history of the information industries in USA: telephony, cinema, radio and TV.

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Jan 29, 2018 Nicholas Moryl rated it liked it

Historical regulatory capture in the US telecom industry: the book.

A reasonable overview of telephone, radio, and television regulatory capture and industrial dominance, but the section on the internet is naturally incomplete; no mention of Facebook, and the net neutrality debate is still ongoing. I wonder where books and music fall in this analysis--why movies are included, but those two are not? (Even if they're counter-examples, they're worth examining. In fact, that likely makes them even mo ...more

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Mar 05, 2019 Cara M rated it liked it

Shelves: technoculture

3.5* this book is really interesting, and the following of the threads of different innovations in communications as they evolved, grew, and conflicted with each other gave a good high level view of the past century of development in this field. that said, it did feel like there was a face of the story that was missing, in the sense that there was very little note of consumer/user action until the net neutrality topic was raised. and since communications are ultimately all about users, that felt ...more

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About Tim Wu

Tim Wu

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Tim Wu is an author, a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing writer for the New York Times.. He has written about technology in numerous publications, and coined the phrase "net neutrality."

Books by Tim Wu

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The Great Migration was the movement of six million African Americans out of the South to urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1...

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“It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.” — 12 likes

“Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.” — 4 likes

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