The Master Switch

The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

By: Tim Wu

Narrated by: Marc Vietor

Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

A secret history of the industrial wars behind the rise and fall of the 20th century's great information empires - Hollywood, the broadcast networks, and AT&T - asking one big question: Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information?

Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate. Every once-free and open technology was in time centralized and closed, a huge corporate power taking control of the master switch. Today, as a similar struggle looms over the Internet, increasingly the pipeline of all other media, the stakes have never been higher. To be decided: who gets heard, and what kind of country we live in. Part industrial exposé, part meditation on the nature of freedom of expression, part battle cry to save the Internet's best features, The Master Switch brings to light a crucial drama rife with indelible characters and stories, heretofore played out over decades in the shadows of our national life.

©2010 Tim Wu (P)2010 Audible, Inc

Critic reviews

“Wu’s engaging narrative and remarkable historical detail make this a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity - and necessary deregulation - in the information age.” ( Publishers Weekly)

“This is an essential look at the directions that personal computing could be headed depending on which policies and worldviews come to dominate control over the Internet.” ( Booklist)

"There’s a sharp insight and a surprising fact on nearly every page of Wu’s masterful survey. Above all, Wu shows that each new communications technology spawns the same old quest for power." ( The Boston Globe)

"A brilliant exploration of the oscillations of communications technologies between 'open' and 'closed' from the early days of the telephone up through Hollywood and broadcast television up to the Internet era." (Forbes.com)

"My pick for economics book of the year." (Ezra Klein, The Washington Post)

Historical, informative

Who was your favorite character and why?

The story about AT&T and it's sometimes pretty evil power grab over the course of its history is pretty shocking. We are seeing other companies do similar things so this book should come as a warning....

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

How IT Giants Have And Will Rule Your Life

Any additional comments?

Part f the reason we study history is so that we can learn from mistakes. After listening to this book you will find some very current parallels with companies of our age...and many of them are on a path that may not be healthy for modern society.

awesome all around

this book chronicles the rise of telephones, movies, cable tv and the internet. In the later parts, it gets into the wars between microsoft and apple and google and everyone else. It's quite amazing to see the screen ripped off your computer and know what is really going on with the powerstruggle for net dominance. This book seriously has me at least questioning if I will purchase an Iphone. The decision is not as simple as it would have been before I read this. And... well... the book is pretty well narrated, too!

Wonderful content and very entertainingly read

this book gives a detailed look at the history of media (radio, phones, tv) and makes a well thought out case for a cycle of openness and then closures if all technology. well worth the price

Important Topic, Interesting Approach, Bad Reading

What made the experience of listening to The Master Switch the most enjoyable?

Lots of twentieth-century technological/corporate history, convincingly presented as relevant to modern policy.

Would you be willing to try another one of Marc Vietor’s performances?

No. The reading is full of false gravity, which he breaks out of only to half-attempt voices for the quotations, including such watery gems as fake german, fake french, old-timey, fancy old-timey, and presidential. It's ridiculous and distracting. Even worse, he shows no understanding of the text, emphasizing inconsequential words and reading asides with the same ponderousness as the main text.

Tough at times

There's a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes, but sometimes the author gets a little preachy and long-winded and I found myself just wishing he would get on with it.

Timely in light of #MastodonMigration

#DingDong decided to ruin the party on the #DirtyBird site with a $44 billion offer to purchase it. Considering his partners, the Saudis, the UAE, and Larry Ellison, it seemed pretty obvious before the deal closed that an anti-democratic cabal was making a bold move to control the public square, legally. So I endeavored to resist.

That #DingDong was willing to light his $22 bil stake and his investor's money on fire, and put his core business at risk, made it abundantly clear that the move wasn't about profits but about controlling the political narrative with respect to the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in America. This is the context in which I discovered Tim Wu's legal history of the media industry, with its "Manichean" dichotomy of centralized and decentralized control.

Tim Wu broadened my perspective by revisiting the evolution of America's media / communications industry. I was unaware that key players sought control of a Master Switch, which could be used to decide who has access to mass communications.

The Impending Closure of the Internet

This book makes an historical argument that the natural evolution for information industries is a succession of generations, where each generation starts with an open disruptive innovation that at some point transitions to a closed monopoly (or duopoly). The book then expands on this model, by showing a few common, but less natural (i.e., forced) variations on this pattern. The first variation is where the established monopoly destroys the new industry in it infancy (usually involving some criminal thuggery and a good deal of predatory pricing and/or price fixing), thus co-opting the disruption. A less common variation is where the government steps in to breakup or limit the anti-social behaivor of a monopoly.

The book then argues that the Internet is historically unique among information industries, because it has created horizontal monopolies (like Google) instead of the traditional vertical monopolies (like ATT or NBC at their peeks). The result is a much more openness for the same level of industry maturity, which is mostly good for society. The author seems deeply ambivalent about rather this is a stable situation. It presents a rather strong set of arguments for the idea that sometime in the next 10 year (approximately) the Internet will probably transformed from the ???Wild West??? into a closed monopoly much more like TV in the ???70s. But in the end the author is unsure that the Internet is not somehow fundamentally different, so he argues that, while this possibility should be taken far more seriously than most do, the actually outcome is approximately unknowable.

Nevertheless, he embraces the idea that society should want the internet to remain open and should be willing to make changes to ensure that this happens.
Thinking about the internet in the context of the long history of abusive monopolistic practices in U.S. information industries is a surprisingly useful. This is one of the better books I???ve read this year.

Interesting and informative

Wu's book ties together the stories of the evolution of various information technologies into mass media conglomerates and empires in America over the past 150 years. Just as interesting as the parallel paths of consolidation into monopolies is the impact of the various larger-than-life moguls who built these empires. From Theodore Vail and Adolf Zucker to Steve Jobs these men recognized the opportunities of their lifetimes and seized them by the throat. It is instructive to consider this recurring history when anticipating the likely future of the internet. Will the Googles dominate or will it be a new era of Net neutrality? It may be too early to say, but this book makes you aware of the likely scenario that history implies. A good read.

Great listen, less than great narration

While the content is interesting, I have a problem with the narrator, who is excessively dramatic and does weird accents when he reads quotes - why?? Th reading is also a bit too slow, which tends to be distracting... Other than than, the book itself is worth reading.

Tim Wu is an excellent writer and strong thinker

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I would recommend this as it is mind expanding. It provides big picture context from which one can put the current internet power struggles into perspective.