The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of
Information Empires by Tim Wu
This was published in 2011 and finally
got around to reading it. The key idea behind this work echoes the
concept of the “Creative Destruction” cycle in innovation. This
was first posited by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter:
"process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes
the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old
one, incessantly creating a new one." - link.
In this book, Mr. Wu provides a
legal/historical/technological context so as to show how this has
effected both the development of innovation in the IT sector (e.g. Telegraph vs Telephones) as well as how this cycle is still in play
in the modern digital era. So that small companies challenge a
traditional service provider, with one emerging to take the elder's
place (the Kronos effect) and in turns has to defend its new position
against fresh newer challengers' innovations.
What seems to be missing is the grand
sense of public service that motivated the early monopolists such as
Bell's Vail, and instead the action to regulate the modern web is
driven by an attempt to lock-in industrial power of past gains, such
as present in the Copyright lobby.
Overall a well constructed, crafted
read which places current innovations in context.
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