Review by Choice Review
Wu (Columbia Univ.), a recognized authority on electronic media, investigates whether the Internet will follow the same historical cycle as have other information technologies--from open to closed, from decentralized to centralized. In a compelling writing style, Wu recounts the histories of telegraphy, telephony, radio, film, television, and finally the Internet. He provides intriguing portraits of key individuals, from inventors and innovators to empire builders, who eventually, often with the assistance of government regulators, centralize and gain control of each technology. Wu describes how Schumpeter's process of creative destruction can be blunted by business and legal strategies that hold disruptive technologies at bay. He urges adoption of a constitutional approach based on a "Separations Principle" to promote openness and decentralization. This approach requires the enforcement of antidiscrimination or common carriage rules, a prohibition on vertical mergers (so that content creators and disseminators remain separate), and the inculcation of an industry ethic that stigmatizes "site blocking, content discrimination and censorship, broadly defined." Wu believes the sacrifice of quality and cost savings this approach likely entails is warranted by increased innovation and greater economic and political freedom. See related, Eli Noam's Media Ownership and Concentration in America (CH, May'10, 47-5144). Summing Up; Highly recommended. General readers; students at all levels; researchers; professionals. R. C. Singleton University of Puget Sound
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SHORTLY after the United States developed the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer realized the country would need a new kind of weapons laboratory. This lab would maintain and improve the military's arsenal rather than create new weapons. It would be called Sandia National Laboratories and placed not far from Los Alamos. Initially, the University of California ran the lab, but President Truman soon decided to transfer its operation to the entity he thought could best run it during the nascent cold war: AT&T. "In my opinion," Truman wrote to an AT&T subsidiary in 1949, "you have here an opportunity to render an exceptional service in the national interest." AT&T ended up running Sandia until the early 1990s. It was one of the more extraordinary instances of Ma Bell's involvement with Uncle Sam. The company owed its very existence to a favorable federal patent ruling in 1878, which saved it from an early death at the hands of Western Union, the dominant telegraph company then trying to crush its new rival. A little more than a century later, Washington broke up AT&T. But regulators soon allowed many of the company's parts to merge back together. This consolidation, Tim Wu argues in "The Master Switch," probably allowed the Bush administration to conduct its wire-tapping program in secret for so long. AT&T is the star of Wu's book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle - only rarely overdrawn - is what Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls "the cycle." "History shows a typical progression of information technologies," he writes, "from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel - from open to closed system." Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. The story covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks, whether they're composed of cables in the ground or movie theaters around the country. Once a company starts building such a network or gaining control over one, it begins slouching toward monopoly. If the government is not already deeply involved in the business by then (and it usually is), it soon will be. Wu argues that it has little choice. Not only are communications businesses particularly prone to consolidation, but the political effects are far greater than they would be in other industries. The book's title comes from a line by Fred Friendly, the longtime CBS News executive, in which he distinguished between free-speech laws and "exclusive custody of the master switch." They are two different things, but either has the ability to shape the flow of information. The same cannot be said, Wu notes, "of orange juice, heating oil, running shoes or dozens of other industries, no matter their size." Today may seem an odd time to be making this argument, given the online flowering of discourse, civil and otherwise. But Wu makes a good case that the Internet is vulnerable to the cycle. The world's computer network is ultimately a physical entity, onto which other forms of communication - film, telephone, television, radio - are starting to migrate. This is what media executives mean by "convergence." It seems likely to help big companies get even bigger, and arguably offers the potential for even tighter control of information than existed in the past. Wu's candidates for the AT&T of the future are Comcast (if its takeover of NBC-Universal succeeds), Google (if it decides to abandon its tradition of openness and instead tries to eliminate rivals) and some combination of AT&T itself and Apple. But he ponders this only briefly and acknowledges that it is too early to know. His most thought-provoking argument about the future may actually be the past. The similarities between radio and the Internet are particularly striking. Radio in the early 20th century was a scattering of amateur stations, started not for profit, but so its hobbyists would have a platform for their views and interests. Lee De Forest, a pioneer who ran a station in the Bronx, urged young people to listen so that in "the still night hours" they could "welcome friendly visitors from the whole wide world." Waldemar Kaempffert, the editor of Scientific American, proclaimed, "All these disconnected communities and houses will be united through radio as they were never united by the telegraph and telephone." Soon, however, radio's heterogeneity began to fade. In 1922, WEAF in New York, AT&T's flagship station, broadcast the first advertisement, for a leafy housing development in Queens. By 1926, AT&T had teamed up with the Radio Corporation of America to form a new radio network, the National Broadcasting Company. The station, at 660 AM, would become known as WNBC (and later as WFAN, the country's first radio station devoted to sports). AT&T and the radio manufacturers wanted radio to transform from hobby to big business, so they decided to fight back, publicly and in the courts, against a commerce secretary who had been protecting radio from what he called "advertising chatter." That commerce secretary was Herbert Hoover. A federal court eventually ruled that Hoover had no authority to assign radio frequencies, and NBC's network mushroomed. The cycle was under way. Wu wisely avoids magic-bullet solutions to the inevitable problems of the communications industry. Simply keeping government out of the business does not work, because the industry tends to form private monopolies if left alone. And having the government run the business, as England and other countries have tried, presents its own problems. The government itself is a monopolist and often behaves like one. Wu instead calls for constraining "all power that derives from the control of information." He writes, "If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion." In practice, this would mean that the Justice Department would have to adopt a broader definition of its antitrust powers, beyond its typical emphasis on competition's effect on prices. The longstanding Hollywood censorship code did not raise ticket prices, after all, but it did violate the country's ideals. Similarly, AT&T had the power to quash the answering machine, which, incredibly, a Bell Labs engineer invented in 1934. The "government's only proper role," Wu concludes, "is as a check on private power, never as an aid to it." It is a useful rule of thumb, even if not every choice breaks down quite so clearly. Wu previously popularized the phrase "net neutrality," an updated version of the old notion of "common carriage" in the telephone industry. The central idea, as with that of this book, is that market competition brings enormous benefits, but the market itself does not ensure competition - or, more broadly, desirable outcomes. This argument can be extended to the economic importance of communications, even if Wu's concern is more political. The businesses he describes have been some of the American economy's great global successes: Google, NBC, Paramount Pictures and many others. They were able to lead the way in part because they could take advantage of the fruits of this country's long tradition - now somewhat diminished - of government investment in basic scientific research that the private sector would never find profitable. The Internet, to take one example, may now be the world's communications network. But it started as a Defense Department project. As "The Master Switch" artfully shows, the government often has a role that no company will play on its own. Wu argues that the Internet is likely to follow the same progression as radio, film and television. David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 12, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*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.--Siegfried, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this eye-opening business history, Wu (Columbia Law Sch.) examines the evolution of media industries, such as film, radio, cable, telephone, and information, with Apple, AT&T, and Google among the major companies discussed. Readers will recognize that current events impacting the information environment are eerily reminiscent of past ones, especially plans affecting the open and free Internet infrastructure. Wu is an exemplary writer because he is able to draw readers into his stories with engaging details. He also here provides an economic analysis of the cyclical nature of the organization and size of firms. Relying on economic theories, Wu advises against government involvement, because it will only interfere with marketplace events. VERDICT Readers should be knowledgeable about the theories of important economists, such as Joseph Schumpeter, and have an economic background in the characteristics of corporate structures, such as monopolies and oligopolies, to make the best use of this book. Recommended for fans of Wu's Who Controls the Internet? and for those interested in the media infrastructure.-Caroline Geck, Newark Public Schs., NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Powerful forces are afoot to take control of the Internetfor profit, of course. It's happened before, writes Slate contributor Wu (Copyright and Communications/Columbia Univ.; co-author: Who Controls the Internet?, 2006), and the corporations have won just about every time.Take Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, "a professor and an amateur inventor, with little taste for business." More at home in the lab than the boardroom, Bell had backers who knew their corporate chicanery, such that the telephone, the child of many fathers, was soon in the hands of a monopoly, ATT, that endured for more than a century. In the spirit of Schumpeterian "creative destruction," one of those investors, who had a bone to pick with the telegraph companyanother monopolysaw the telephone as a means to kill the earlier technology, and so it was. Radio, too, emerged from many inventors, another example of the simultaneity of innovation. In the 1920s, writes Wu, radio "was a two-way medium accessible to almost any hobbyist," and private individuals and small businesses alike started radio stations as quickly as they set up blogs today. Trying to get a radio license today is a matter of considerable cost and bureaucratic negotiation, and of course it is illegal to broadcast without that licenseanother win for the corporations, which use these gatekeeping mechanisms to keep competition out. Examining one communication technology after another, Wu, coiner of the term "net neutrality," 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. Given that Google has recently been in negotiations with Verizon to take a public utilitythe Internetever more tightly into private hands, that story is timely.Eye-opening reading, with implications for just about anyone who uses that utility, which means just about everyone.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.