The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

By Tim Wu

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307390993
• ISBN13: 9780307390998
• Release Date: November 2011
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.2"