num_pages: 384
description: 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 Internetthe entire flow of American informationcome to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of the master switch? That is the big question of Tim Wus pathbreaking book.As Wus sweeping history shows each of the new media of the twentieth centuryradio telephone television and filmwas 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 . . . NBCs 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 empirea progress often blessed by government typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alikeWu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of todays great information powers: Apple Google and an eerily resurgent AT&amp;T. A battle royal looms for the Internets 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 expos 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.
language: English
title: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
publisher: Knopf