Tim Wu. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 336 pages.
This is a hard book to review because it’s really two book ideas melded into one: a history of the empire-building and empire-busting that characterized the first century of information industries, and a policy piece urging greater Internet freedom, apparently through closer government regulation of the Internet.
The history is certainly interesting, and well done. Wu traces the development of the telephone, movie, radio, and television industries from their 19th-century origins, and captures a great amount of detail about smaller players often neglected in the master narrative: Theodore Vail, a titan in his day who’s not longer a household name but who is largely responsible for the broad reach of AT&T; Henry Tuttle, who fought a court battle against AT&T to produce attachments for its telephones; Edwin Armstong, who pioneered in FM radio but whose work was suppressed by RCA; and many others. For those who believe that the telecom industry’s past is an unbroken record on innovation, Wu’s book will be a real eye-opener. He extends this analysis into the Internet era, with a particularly good rundown of the AOL Time Warner merger debacle.
The policy aspects, however, read almost like an anti-Apple and pro-Google brief that I suspect might lack some balance. Wu makes much of Google’s open vs Apple’s closed structure, and does a good job of chronicling how the initially-open Apple’s focus shifted–a change he credits to the ascendancy of Steve Jobs over Steve Wozniak. Yet Apple’s decision to produce closed, proprietary products isn’t inherently good or bad (to me); some prefer it, some don’t. Doubtless he’s right that a revanchist AT&T isn’t the best friend of the average consumer, and secret deals between the telephone giant and the government have disturbing implications for privacy. But he seems to put all of his chips on the AT&T/Apple iPhone partnership is an augur of doom, a prediction that’s already out of date, as the iPhone’s now on Verizon and will probably be coming to other carriers as well. And the recent Android malware scare might suggest that Apple’s more closed system has its benefits.
So it’s certainly an interesting book, and one I’m very glad to read, but the anti-Apple/pro-Google slant is so extreme that it makes me very leery of taking any of its policy points at face value.