A New Yorker and Fortune Best Book of the Year
"A must-read for all Americans who want to remain the ones deciding
what they can read, watch, and listen to." --Arianna Huffington
Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today's great information
powers--Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T--Tim Wu uncovers a
time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry
begets empire.
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"? Here, Tim Wu shows how a battle royale for the Internet's
future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.
