The Master Switch
Description
A New Yorker and Fortune Best Book of the Year 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 Internet's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.
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Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I - The Rise
- Chapter 1 - The Disruptive Founder
- Chapter 2 - Radio Dreams
- Chapter 3 - Mr. Vail is a Big Man
- Chapter 4 - The Time is Not Ripe for Feature Films
- Chapter 5 - Centralize All Radio Activities
- Chapter 6 - The Paramount Ideal
- Part II - Beneath the All-Seeing Eye
- Chapter 7 - The Foreign Attachment
- Chapter 8 - The Legion of Decency
- Chapter 9 - FM Radio
- Chapter 10 - Now We Add Sight to Sound
- Part III - The Rebels, the Challengers, and the Fall
- Chapter 11 - The Right Kind of Breakup
- Chapter 12 - The Radicalism of the Internet Revolution
- Chapter 13 - Nixon's Cable
- Chapter 14 - Broken Bell
- Chapter 15 - Esperanto for Machines
- Part IV - Reborn Without a Soul
- Chapter 16 - Turner Does Television
- Chapter 17 - Mass Production of the Spirit
- Chapter 18 - The Return of AT&T
- Part V - The Internet Against Everyone
- Chapter 19 - A Surprising Wreck
- Chapter 20 - Father and Son
- Chapter 21 - The Separations Principle
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- About the Author
