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”? Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information powers — Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T — Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire.
