The Master Switch – The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
A fascinating and informative look at the history of information empire cycles.
Excerpts (page numbering is from hardcover 1st edition):
p 18 – So many revolutionary innovations start small, with outsiders, amateurs, and idealists in attics and garages.
p 19 – There was, it is fair to say, no single inventor of the telephone. And this reality suggests that what we call invention, while not easy, is simply what happens once a technology’s development reaches the point where the next step becomes available to many people … in (a) sense, inventors are often more like craftsmen than miracle workers. Indeed, the history of science is full of examples of what the writer Malcolm Gladwell terms “simultaneous discovery” – so full that the phenomenon represents the norm rather than the exception … The inventors we remember are significant not so much as inventors, but as founders of “disruptive’ industries, ones that shake up the technological status quo. Through circumstance or luck, they are exactly at the right distance to imagine the future and to create an independent industry to exploit it.
p 19 The importance of the outsider (to invention) owes to his being at the right remove from the prevailing currents of thought about the problem at hand. That distance affords a perspective close enough to understand the problem, yet far enough for greater freedom of thought, freedom from, as it were, the cognitive distortion of what is as opposed to what could be. This innovative distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts.
p 20 – describes 2 types of innovation: sustaining (improvements that make a product better, but do not threaten its market), and disruptive (conversely, it threatens to displace a product altogether)
p 57 – describes a common carrier in communications as one which refrains from picking winners in other sectors of the economy or public life – any area that privileged access to .. communications could influence.
p 57 – Common carriage … is as fundamental to free communications … as the First Amendment is to free expression.
p 57 – Bell’s dedication to common carriage was a promise to serve any customer willing to pay, charge fixed rates, and carry his or her traffic without discrimination.
p 58 – At the heart of common carriage is the idea that certain businesses are either so intimately connected, even essential, to the publicgood, or so inherently powerful – imagine the water or electric utilities – that they must be compelled to conduct their affairs in a nondiscriminatory way … four basic industries being identified as “public callings”: telecommunications, banking, energy, and transportation. Each plays a certain essential role in the workings of the nation and the economy, and thus these are the industries that have attracted regulation as common carriers, or infrastructure.
p 69 – …this is a case where the greater harm of monopoly reveals itself to be not economic but expressive. The (crushing film monopoly) Trust’s rules controlled not just costs, but the very nature of what film, as a creative medium, could be. In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be easured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately lead to censorship.
p 70 – Last and perhaps most damaging was the Trust’s arrogation to itself of the role of official censor. The Trust simply did not allow films it deemed inappropriate to be made or exhibited.
Not enough time to finish this entry, but especially noteworthy content on pages 116, 134, 146, 162, 164, 168, 198, 220, 244, 252, 280, 290, 292 and 300.
Visit http://timwu.org for more info.