Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9412007" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch" target="_blank">The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires</a>, by Tim Wu. I was gifted this book over a decade ago, but never sat down to read it before now, as part of a continuing effort to finish (or, in this case, start) the books on my shelves before acquiring (too many) more.Part history lesson and part awareness campaign, Wu's book examines five information industries – telephone, radio, film, television, and the Internet – looking at the circumstances of their formation and their regulation/deregulation over time. He takes note of a "Cycle" (note the capitalization) whereby an industry will start out fairly decentralized, then gradually be consolidated into either a single monopoly or a handful of large industries over time, until a disruptive innovation comes along (in a nod to Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction") and the entire thing starts all over again.Of course, it doesn't always proceed this way; some industries are regulated virtually from their conception (television being one) while others try to avoid (or at least delay) the emergence of a disruptive power by stifling/suppressing a new technology that could displace them (FM radio is notable in this regard), in what Wu calls the "Kronos effect."I'll take a moment to note that Wu's writing style is quite snappy and is very easy to read, never becoming dry while avoiding sensationalism. His overviews of the industries outlined above will strike experts in the histories of those areas as being fairly superficial, but that can't really be helped; much like Jared Diamond's famous Guns, Germs, and Steel, Wu is looking at effects that are spread out across more than a century and which span different industries; a high-level overview, avoiding getting into the weeds, is the only feasible way to do such a thing.The final part of the book moves almost into advocacy with regards to the importance of keeping the Internet decentralized (which is no surprise, given that Wu is the one who coined the term "net neutrality"). In this regard, he makes for a persuasive point (which I'll illustrate here with my own example): today, we all take it for granted that movies and TV shows will be found on some streaming services and not others; if a given film/show isn't found on a service you have, your only options are to buy access to that service, acquire it some other way (e.g. pirating, buying/renting an offline version, borrowing a copy from a friend, etc.), or simply waiting for some licensing deal to bring it to a service you have.By contrast, the World Wide Web portion of the Internet is (site-specific paywalls notwithstanding) open to everyone, regardless of who your ISP is. Imagine if you had to sign on with (i.e. pay to subscribe to) one Internet service to get to Facebook, and a different one to get to Youtube, and a third to get to Amazon. Compared to the level of Internet access we enjoy now, such a thing would never be publicly acceptable.While Wu never outlines this particular comparison (the book was written in 2010, before streaming TV shows and movies had become so ubiquitous), I'll flatter myself by saying that it goes to the heart of what he talks about at the end of the book, in terms of what he wants people to be aware of and to safeguard. The next turning of the Cycle is ever around the corner, and as unthinkable as a less-open Internet might seem to us now, there's someone out there with a lot of money and a great deal of corporate power thinking about how to make that happen in order to enrich themselves.</blockquote>

Verification