Zusatztext 42758757 Informationen zum Autor Tim Wu Klappentext A New Yorker and Fortune Best Book of the YearAnalyzing 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 Internet's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out. Chapter 1 Exactly forty years before Bell's National Geographic banquet, Alexander Bell was in his laboratory in the attic of a machine shop in Boston, trying once more to coax a voice out of a wire. His efforts had proved mostly futile, and the Bell Company was little more than a typically hopeless start-up. Bell was a professor and an amateur inventor, with little taste for business: his expertise and his day job was teaching the deaf. His main investor and the president of the Bell Company was Gardiner Green Hubbard, a patent attorney and prominent critic of the telegraph monopoly Western Union. It is Hubbard who was responsible for Bell's most valuable asset: its telephone patent, filed even before Bell had a working prototype. Besides Hubbard, the company had one employee, Bell's assistant, Thomas Watson. That was it. If the banquet revealed Bell on the cusp of monopoly, here is the opposite extreme from which it began: a stirring image of Bell and Watson toiling in their small attic laboratory. It is here that the Cycle begins: in a lonely room where one or two men are trying to solve a concrete problem. So many revolutionary innovations start small, with outsiders, amateurs, and idealists in attics or garages. This motif of Bell and Watson alone will reappear throughout this account, at the origins of radio, television, the personal computer, cable, and companies like Google and Apple. The importance of these moments makes it critical to understand the stories of lone inventors. Over the twentieth century, most innovation theorists and historians became somewhat skeptical of the importance of creation stories like Bell's. These thinkers came to believe the archetype of the heroic inventor had been over-credited in the search for a compelling narrative. As William Fisher puts it, "Like the romantic ideal of authorship, the image of the inventor has proved distressingly durable." These critics undeniably have a point: even the most startling inventions are usually arrived at, simultaneously, by two or more people. If that's true, how singular could the genius of the inventor really be? There could not be a better example than the story of the telephone itself. On the very day that Alexander Bell was registering his invention, another man, Elisha Gray, was also at the patent office filing for the very same breakthrough.* The coincidence takes some of the luster off Bell's "eureka." And the more you examine the history, the worse it looks. In 1861, sixteen years before Bell, a German man named Johann Philip Reis presented a primitive telephone to the Physical Society of Frankfurt, claiming that "with the help of the galvanic current, [the inventor] is able to reproduce at a distance the tones of instruments and even, to a certain degree, the human voice." Germany has long considered Reis the telephone's inventor. Another man, a small-town Pennsylvania electrician named Daniel...

“Brilliant.” —Forbes

“Thought-provoking. . . . An intellectually ambitious history of modern communications.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating, balanced, and rigorous—a tour de force.” —The New York Review of Books
 
“Entertaining. . . . There’s a sharp insight and a surprising fact on nearly every page of Wu’s masterful survey.” —The Boston Globe

“Unexpectedly fascinating. . . . A substantial and well-written account of the five major communications industries that have shaped the world as we know it: telephony, radio, movies, television and the Internet. . . . The economy and common sense of The Master Switch . . . makes it valuable to the non-wonk wondering how we got where we are today, and where we might be headed next.” —Salon
 
“Engaging. . . . Wu presents a powerful case. . . . His scholarly command of the past century of communications innovation is prodigious.” —The Plain Dealer
 
“My pick for economics book of the year.” —Ezra Klein, The Washington Post
 
“An explosive history that makes it clear how the information business became what it is today. Important reading.” —Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Free, and editor of Wired magazine
 
“A brilliant explanation and history. . . . As fascinating, wide-ranging, and, ultimately, inspiring book about communications policy and the information industries as you could hope to find. . . . Wu is that rare animal, an accomplished scholar who can write about complex ideas in ways that are accessible to all. And the ideas he’s covering are as important as any in our ideological marketplace today.” —Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
 
“Groundbreaking. . . . Offers powerful lessons from the past for the future of the Internet.” —Nature
 
“Original, insightful. . . . Wu provides a compelling reminder of the monopolist instincts of communications and media companies.” —The Washington Monthly
 
“Masterful. . . . Eminently readable. . . . A superstar in the telecommunications world . . . Wu has a way of presenting complex and important concepts in a clear and understandable way.” —Art Brodsky, The Huffington Post
 
“Wu is the rare writer capable of exhuming history and also interpreting current affairs. In this profound and important book, he excels at both.” —New Scientist
 
“Wu’s work is a must read for those who want to know about the future of the Internet. The Master Switch is brilliant, with a distinctive voice that comes through on every page.” —Josh Silverman, CEO, Skype
 
“As a history lesson for anyone interested in how innovations move from inventors’ garages and laboratories to our living rooms, The Master Switch is a good read, but it is its relevance to the evolution of the Internet that makes it an important book.” —Times Higher Education Supplement
 
“Trenchant and provocative. . . . In vivid and often depressing detail, Wu describes how the true inventors and innovators of information technology have been destroyed by their self-aggrandizing counterparts in the executive offices.” —Toronto Star
 
“A free and open Internet is not a given. Indeed, corporate interests are working feverishly to seize control of it. Drawing on history, Wu shows how this could easily happen and why we are at risk of losing the freedom we now take for granted. A must-read for all Americans who want to remain the ones deciding what they can read, watch, and listen to.” —Arianna Huffington
 
“An ambitious history of the communications industries in the 20th century. . . . [Full of] great stories, and Wu tells them expertly.” &…