The Master Switch - eBook

9780307594655
0-307-59465-3

A New Yorker and Fortune Best Book of the YearAnalyzing the strategic maneuvers of todays great information powersApple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&TTim Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which.

read more…

invention begets industry and industry begets empire.It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industryfrom the telephone to radio to filmonce 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 Webthe entire flow of American informationcome to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of "the master switch"? Here, Tim Wu shows how a battle royale for Internets future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.