Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010)

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 Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.

As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was 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 . . . NBC’s 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 empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s 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 exposé, 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.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
Borzoi Books
ISBN 0307269930, 9780307269935
366 pages

review (Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo)

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-16)

e-G8 Forum report (2011)

“Fittingly, this e-book is a virtual incarnation of an event whose physical existence was fleeting, but whose impact will endure. Opened on May 24, 2011 in Paris by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the e-G8 Forum gathered together the finest minds and most skillful operators of the Internet for just two days. But the Forum’s effect as a catalyst—on participants, on the G8 Summit that succeeded it, and on public policy by governments worldwide—was, and will continue to be, far more meaningful.

The Forum was an intense and ambitious gathering of 1500 participants from more than 30 countries. It culminated in a delegation to the G8 Summit of Heads and State and governments, where questions regarding
the Internet were on the agenda for the first time in the history of international summit meetings. The delegation was led by Maurice Lévy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, and comprised Hiroski Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten; Yuri Milner, CEO of Digital Sky Technologies; Stéphane Richard, CEO of France Telecom-Orange; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook.” (from Preface)

Edited by Ruth Marshall
Produced by PublicisLive
Published in June 2011
76 pages

authors
wikipedia
protest site

PDF

Freedom on the Net 2011: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media Freedom (2011)

In order to illuminate the emerging threats to internet freedom and identify areas of opportunity, Freedom House created a unique methodology to assess the full range of elements that comprise digital media freedom. This report examines internet freedom in 37 countries around the globe. The study’s findings indicate that the threats to internet freedom are growing and have become more diverse. Cyber attacks, politically-motivated censorship, and government control over internet infrastructure have emerged as especially prominent threats.

Editors: Sanja Kelly, Sarah Cook
Published by Freedom House, Washington DC, 18 April 2011
410 pages

publisher

PDF (full report)
PDF (booklet of key findings)