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Tim Wu, 2010: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The main theme of “The Master Switch” is the “oscillation of information industries between open and closed”, a phenomenon  Tim Wu finds and tracks in “any of the past century’s transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television, or film”, referring to it simply as “the Cycle” (p. 6). The historical description unsurprisingly culminates in an analysis of current battles around net neutrality and the openess of the internet.

Wu sees “a chasm opened between Google and its allies like Amazon, eBay, and nonprofits like Wikipedia on the one side and Apple, AT&T, and the entertainment conglomerates on the other” (p. 289).  Those two coalitions, however, are not to be considered “one pack of wolves chasing another” but rather as “polar bears battling lions for domination of the world”:

“Each animal, insuperably dominant in its natural element – the polar bear on ice and snow, the lion on the open plains – will undertake a land grab where it has no natural business being. The only practicable strategy will be a campaign of climate change, the polar bears seeking to cover as much of the world with snow as they can, while the lion tries to coax a savannah from the edges of a tundra.” (p. 289-290)  Read the rest of this entry »