Tim Wu -- The master switch: the rise and fall of information empires ======================================================================= Wu's central focus is on innovation. He wants to know what encourages it and what enables it and, conversely, what retards it. He believes that communications and information industries have a tendency, over time, to become closed monopolies that block innovation to preserve the position and power of dominant players or firms. Wu has written articles explaining what he calls principles that influence innovation, Net neutrality, the effects of regulation and deregulation on the progress of the Net, etc. In contrast, this book can be viewed are providing case studies that can be used to illustrate those principles. Some of these "case studies" are the telephone system (especially in the early 1900's), radio, the movie industry, and television. Here are some of the dominant themes discussed in the book: - Left to itself, a communications/information technology drifts toward monopoly and a closed system that denies access to new participants. This is what Wu calls the Cycle. - The U.S. federal government has an inclination to get involved in this process, to pick winners and support them, and to increase the power of established powers (players) to deny access to new players. - There are things that can be done to prevent the evolution of a dominant power, and we're not doing them. - We need to separate the different layers of a communications technology. We should not allow a single firm to control all of infrastructure, content, delivery, and add-on equipment. - An ad hoc regulation regime, allowing a small number of firms to become dominant before taking action, does not work. Once a firm becomes that dominant in an industry, they have too much power to influence the political process that oversees regulation and breaking up the firm becomes to disruptive. - Now, all communications is converging on the Internet. If you allow that to get away from us, Wu argues that getting it right with respect to communications technologies and the companies that participate in them is especially important, more important than other industries, in part because, control of communications and information gives a firm the power to shape and control our society and our political system. Wu believes and argues that our political system has a tendency toward being "captured" by an industry, and once captured, to support and preserve dominant players in that industry. So, preventing that sort of dominant power from occurring and insulating out Federal government from it becomes especially important. Towards the end of the book there is a comparison and analysis of Apple and Google. That's especially interesting to me, because I'm a believer in Open Source software development. So, comparing Apple, which follows a very closed, proprietary model with Google, which does quite a bit in support of Open Source development helps me think about what might happen if one or the other (Apple or Google) attains a position of dominance with respect to the Internet. There are advantages and disadvantages to each alternative future: (1) dominance by Apple or an Apple-like, closed company (2) or dominance by Google or an Google-like, somewhat open company. For example, Apple produces more finished, appliance-like products that are easier to use, more stylish, and require less knowledge about internals, whereas when a company produces more open products, those products are likely to require more knowledge, more care, and more understanding of the product's internals and internal conceptual model. Wu's main concern is that a company that produces closed, sealed products also closes off the possibility of innovation by those outside the company. He ends the book with some prescriptions. Wu is capable of being objective and reasonably impartial, but his biases and preferences come out in this section. Wu wants us to ensure that we separate different layers such as network owners, service providers, equipment owners, etc, and that we prevent vertical integration of these layers by a single firm or entity. Along the way, you'll learn about the Cycle. Wu claims that all communications technologies (telephony, radio, movies, television, and now the Internet) go through this same series of changes, starting as an open system with room and access to many players and innovators and eventually becoming a closed system and a monopoly that blocks out all players except those that control all aspects (infrastructure, content, equipment, etc). In our society (the U.S.) especially, where innovation and technological advance is so important to economic growth (we've mostly given up on manufacturing things the old fashioned way), losing control of the Internet and communications to a small number of powerful company, with the loss of innovation that would result from that will have especially negative consequences. Unless, you believe that it would *not* result in a loss of innovation. In the regulation and monopoly debate, Wu allows for a controversy. On the one side are the those who believe that the Net is a service and infrastructure and that its use should be open to everyone, and that innovation will occur on the periphery. In contrast, there are those who believe that the Net is a kind of property, that if you want to encourage innovation we must guarantee the rights to that property by its owners, and that if we do so, innovation will happen in the center, by the owners of the Network, I suppose. With a political landscape as divisive as ours, I do not have much confidence in our ability to resolve that disagreement. Wu's proposal for safeguarding us from the dominance of is what he calls the Separation Principal. It would require that those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure that carries the information, and those who control the tools or venues of access must be separate from each other. Fine, but since we've just seen the approval of the merger of Comcast and NBC, there does not seem to be a lot of hope for that plan. A slightly off-topic note: The problem that Wu describes and analyzes in one of an extreme disparity of power in the private sector and consequences of that disparity in our political sector and in our lives. Wu's claim is that the U.S. Constitution and our government structures protects us from the acquisition of extreme political power by a small number of actors (not sure that I agree), but that in the private sector, we have no analogous protection from an extreme concentration of power. I'd like to claim that we also have no protection from the acquisition of excessive amounts of wealth, nor from extreme disparity of income. That too has consequences. Unfortunately, neither our system of government nor our financial/economic system seems able to right this kind of disparity and its consequences. Still, Wu does a valuable service in describing and analyzing it. Some references: - http://www.timwu.org/ - Tim Wu's academic papers -- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=159088. See especially: (1) "Network Neutrality: Competition, Innovation, and Nondiscriminatory Access" and (2) "The Broadband Debate: A User's Guide". 02/04/2011 .. vim:ft=rst:fo+=a: