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Unlike the telephone, radio, the Internet, and other technologies, electronic television in America simply skipped any amateur or noncommercial phase.*
Industry structure, as I have suggested, is what determines the freedom of expression in the underlying medium.
“while television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.
IN THE SMALL CRACKS of the twentieth century’s empires, challengers were slowly born over the decades of dominance. Interestingly, each of these would come to life as a tiny irrelevancy, a speck off the map. Small-town entrepreneurs invented the community antennas that would become cable television. A failing UHF broadcaster from Atlanta, Ted Turner, pioneered the idea of the cable network. Filmmakers until then excluded from all but the most obscure theaters would remake Hollywood, damaged by television and the antitrust division of the Justice Department. And an impractical, highly abstract
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Fittingly, during the 1950s, AT&T, for its part, adopted the notably Orwellian slogan “Communications Is the Foundation of Democracy.”2
In every information industry, the government mediated what would have otherwise surely been a more tumultuous course of the Cycle.
But even before the first attempt to break up Bell, in 1948, the government would take action against another information empire, forcing the Hollywood studios to sell their theaters and thus precipitating the collapse of the carefully designed studio system.
Both breakups—that of AT&T and that of the studios—would generate significant controversy, at the time and later. For in each case, there would be those who saw the dismemberment as a senseless summary execution of a robust, if restrictive, industry.
Barry Goldwater, the conservative icon and candidate for president, put it this way: “I fear that the breakup of AT&T is potentially the worst thing to happen to our national interests in telecommunications that will ever occur.”3
Often the useful results are delayed and unpredictable, while the negative outcomes are immediate and obvious. Deregulating air travel, for instance, implied a combination of greater choice, lower prices, and, alas, smaller seats, among other downgrades, as one might have more or less foreseen.
The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson’s idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.… It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
By the 1940s the Hollywood studio system had been perfected as a machine for producing, distributing, and exhibiting films at a guaranteed rate of return
In The Folklore of Capitalism (1937), Arnold compared the role of U.S. antitrust law to statutes concerning prostitution: he deemed that both existed more to flatter American moral vanity than to be enforced.5
By the time he took over the antitrust department in the 1930s, the United States, once a nation of small businesses and farms, was dominated by monopolies and cartels in nearly every industry. As the economist Alfred Chandler famously described it, the American economy was now dominated by the “visible hand” of managerial capitalism.6 This despite the fact that the text of the Sherman Act, the main antitrust law, wasn’t (and isn’t) all that ambiguous. The law explicitly made monopolization and deals in restraint of trade illegal. A nonlawyer can understand this from reading sections one and
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And he repeatedly denounced the film industry as “distinctly un-American,” and characterized its structure as a “vertical cartel like the vertical cartels of Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia.
In late April 1963, in the D Ring of the massive new building called the Pentagon, J.C.R. Licklider sat before a typewriter in his office, working on a memo. A member of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)—he wore the thick-rimmed black glasses popular among engineers of the era to prove it—Licklider addressed his memo to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network,
“It will possibly turn out, I realize, that only on rare occasions do most or all of the computers in the overall system operate together in an integrated network. It seems to me to be interesting and important, nevertheless, to develop a capability for integrated network operation.
“We would have at least four large computers,” he continued, “and a great assortment of disc files and magnetic tape units—not to mention the remote consoles and teletype stations—all churning away.
There could be no Internet as we know it without a concept of the computer as something beyond an adding machine—this had to come first.
Engelbart “saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols. He would create a workstation for organizing all of the information and communications needed for any given project.”5
Having concluded that AT&T’s long distance system was vulnerable to a Soviet strike, Baran came up with an ingenious means to harden the system. The idea was to try to turn the telephone infrastructure, a point-to-point system, into a highly redundant network—that is, one with various paths between any two points, so that if one route were taken out, the others would survive.† Baran’s inspiration was the human brain, which can sometimes recover from damage by reassigning lost functions to neural paths still intact. In order for his approach to work, Baran envisioned breaking up every message
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Ideologically, AT&T was committed to a network of defined circuits, or reserved paths, controlled by a single entity. Based on the principle that any available path was a good path, the packet concept admitted, however theoretically, the possibility of a network with multiple owners—an open network. And such a notion was anathema to AT&T’s “ONE COMPANY, ONE SYSTEM, UNIVERSAL SERVICE.
Baran would spend four years at RAND trying to persuade AT&T to build the world’s first packet network, which he saw as simply an advance, not a threat. Yet even with the Air Force offering to pay for an experimental network, AT&T would not be budged. Baran would have to look elsewhere to try out his ideas.
In his 1968 paper “The Computer as a Communication Device,” Licklider and a fellow scientist, Robert Taylor, made the following prediction: “We believe that we are entering a technological age in which we will be able to interact with the richness of living information—not merely in the passive way that we have become accustomed to using books and libraries, but as active participants in an ongoing process, bringing something to it through our interaction with it, and not simply receiving something from it by our connection to it.
Freud wrote, “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
Cable, they believed, might well prove more revolutionary than the printing press. With the capacity in theory to bring an unlimited number of channels of information into the home, it had the potential to heal American politics, revive local communities, and offer every American direct access to the world’s knowledge and wisdom:
Smith became a believer. The idea of a technology that might democratize information resonated with the values of late-1960s New York,
In the late 1960s, cable had a distinctive identity. It was a scrappy industry of small-town entrepreneurs in perpetual trouble with the law, something akin to the file sharing sites of the early twenty-first century—a band of outsiders, certainly; outlaws, maybe.3
In the late 1940s or so, men like John Walson, the owner of an appliance store in the Pennsylvania mountains, began erecting giant antennas to “catch” the weak signals and then transmit them over wires to paying customers.
The real significance of these towers to our larger narrative, however, will be as the first alternative to AT&T’s long lines, a new channel for sending information across the country instantaneously.
The broadcasters banded together to squash cable, or at least beat it back into the boonies. Their campaign would mark another instance of the Kronos effect: an effort by an existing media power to devour a suspected challenger in its infancy.
Siding with the broadcasters, the FCC began to use its regulatory powers to throttle the cable industry.
With such operational constraints, investment in cable dried up. And so it was that what had seemed as late as 1968 a classic case of creative destruction in the making, the emergence of a clearly disruptive technology in which even some broadcasters, seeing its inevitability, had already begun to invest, ended with deepening the entrenchment of the established broadcast
What ails us is not too many Brinkleys and Cronkites, not the broadcast executives who favor Nixon … not a conspiracy of white supremacist station owners who will not give minority groups the prime time of day (although there are a few of these). Rather the major restrictive and malevolent force is the absurd shortage of air time.
Friendly had identified a new reality of the age of mass information: the power of concentrated media to narrow the national conversation. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that new means of facilitating
Based on this logic, Friendly developed a notion of how cable might cure what was ailing the nation, including electoral politics, an arena in which he thought television had “made the high cost of campaigning an aberration of democracy.
bit by bit, Theodore Vail’s faith in centralized monopoly was giving way to a new belief in the value of decentralization.
FCC, Bell made the same point, if less colorfully: “Since the telephone companies have the responsibility to establish, operate and improve the telephone system,” argued Bell, “they must have absolute control over the quality, installation, and maintenance of all parts of the system in order effectively to carry out that responsibility.”3
So important were the long lines, you may remember, that in the early 1900s J. P. Morgan had used his financial muscle to prevent financing of any would-be alternative network.
Based on the Carterfone advance, the FCC went further and specified something simple but absolutely essential: the familiar RJ-45 telephone jack. You have probably used the phone jack hundreds of times without realizing the hard-fought battle behind it.
They also made possible the career of Dennis Hayes, a computer hobbyist (“geek” is the term of art) who, in 1977, built the first modulator/demodulator (modem) designed and priced for consumers, the so-called Hayes Modem. He built, that is, the first consumer device that allowed personal computers to talk to each other, and with that you can spy the first causal relation between the federal deregulation of the 1970s and the birth of a mass Internet.6
In 1971, the FCC issued a rule banning AT&T from directly entering the market for “data processing” or “online services.
But it would be Bell’s course of retaliation, not the existence of their monopoly, that ultimately would put the Justice Department to the test and move them to seek a judgment against the firm for abusing its privileged power. In this sense, Bell’s competitors served the FCC as a cape serves the bullfighter, goading the
What such well-oiled machines do not do so well, however, is initiate the sort of creative destruction that revolutionizes industries and ultimately multiplies productivity and value. And where information is the ultimate commodity, the multiplier effect is incalculably great.
As Cerf explained it, he and Kahn were focused on developing not some grand design but rather a very much ad hoc accommodation. Running on a collection of government lines and lines leased from AT&T, the ARPANET was at the time just one of three packet networks in development. The others were a packet radio network and a packet satellite network, both privately run. Cerf and Kahn were trying to think of some way to make these networks talk to one another. That was the immediate necessity for an “internetwork,” or a network of networks.
The Internet’s design, then, wasn’t the result of some grand theory or vision that emerged fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Rather, these engineers were looking for a specific technical fix. Their solution was indeed ingenious, but only later would it become clear just how important it was. Cerf describes the open design of the Internet as necessitated by the particularities of the specific engineering challenge he faced. “A lot of the design,” Cerf said, “was forced on us.
Now as then, the salient reality—and one that too many observers don’t grasp, or overlook—is that the Internet works over an infrastructure that doesn’t belong to those using it. The owner is always someone else, and in the 1970s, that someone was generally AT&T.5
The stroke of genius underlying a network that could interconnect other networks was the concept of “encapsulation.” As Cerf said, “we thought of it as envelopes.” Encapsulation means wrapping information from local networks in an envelope that the internetwork could recognize and direct.
As a practical matter, this innovation would allow the Internet to run on any infrastructure, and carry any application, its packets traveling any type of wire or radio broadcast band, even those owned by an entity as given to strict controls as AT&T. It was truly a first in human history: an electronic information network independent of the physical infrastructure over which it ran. The invention of encapsulation also permitted the famous “layered” structure of the Internet, whereby communications functions are segregated, allowing the network to negotiate the differing technical standards of
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Cerf and Kahn pursued a principle for Internet protocols that was the exact opposite of Vail’s mantra of “One System, One Policy, Universal Service.
