Lines of authority: 'net neutrality' isn't the only way to keep big telecom companies from controlling what we see, hear, and read.

• Author: Pearlstein, Steven
• Position: Book review

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

by Tim Wu

Alfred A. Knopf, 384 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Tim Wu thinks he has discovered a recurring pattern in the history of modern telecommunications.

"The Cycle," as he calls it, starts with a technological breakthrough that allows someone to communicate with someone else better, faster, or cheaper than before. Think of the telegraph, the telephone, movies, radio, television, cable television. Each new medium starts out more as a curiosity, the plaything of inventors and hobbyists. But pretty soon people begin to figure out the potential to change the way business is clone or life is lived. Before long, we are in that messy, disorganized, exciting phase in which lots of people are trying lots of creative ways to harness the new technology.

At some point it becomes clear that the new medium works best if lots of people have access to the same network. It also becomes apparent that building out and supporting these networks takes lots of money. And so what starts out as a creative, democratic, and fragmented new medium soon falls under the control of a handful of well-financed industrial conglomerates. To fight off rivals, these conglomerates win the favor of regulators and politicians, or wage brutal legal warfare to prevent or delay the introduction of new ideas and disruptive new technologies. Ultimately, however, after decades during which consumers and the economy as a whole have been denied the benefits of choice, competition, and freedom of expression, the stranglehold is broken.

Wu's "Cycle" represents a "Manichean contest" between the open and the closed, between unbounded creativity and enforced mediocrity, between free markets and central planning, between vibrant democracy and confining corporate dictatorship. By now you have a pretty good sense of where this is going. Wu's contention is that we are just now at that tipping point when the next generation of vertically integrated conglomerates is about to put the stranglehold on the newest medium, the Internet. Only government can prevent it, by insisting on a policy of "net neutrality," a term Wu coined several years ago and a policy he has championed as chairman of Free Press, a media watchdog group. (The multi-hatted Wu is also a Columbia University law professor and a fellow at the New America Foundation.)

As history, The Master Switch is original, insightful, even compelling. Wu skillfully evocates the early...