The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

A 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.