Why this book
Tim Wu, the law professor who coined the term "net neutrality," builds this book around what he calls the Cycle: a recurring pattern in which a new information technology — the telephone, radio, film, television — is born open, chaotic, and full of independent tinkerers, only to be captured within a generation by a single dominant company or a tight cartel, often with the government's tacit blessing. His central figure is Theodore Vail, who built AT&T's Bell System into the most complete information empire in American history, and who argued, with apparent sincerity, that competition was actually immoral — that a benevolent monopoly, accountable to the public through regulation, served society better than a chaotic marketplace of small rivals. Wu traces the same pattern through Adolph Zukor's consolidation of the fledgling film business into the Hollywood studio system, and David Sarnoff's maneuvering at NBC to secure a durable radio and television duopoly, in each case a visionary claiming public purpose while quietly closing a once-open market.
The book's urgency comes from its final turn toward the internet: Wu argues the same forces that captured earlier open technologies are already visible in how Apple and Google were, by 2010, working to bundle content and control access in increasingly closed ecosystems, and he asks whether the internet's founding openness is a durable structural feature or simply a phase awaiting its own Theodore Vail. Critics have pushed back on how well the Cycle holds up after 1960 — Wu's own account of deregulation in telephone, film, and cable from the 1960s through the 1980s reads more like a sustained trend toward openness than a swing back toward closure, and his examples of renewed post-1980 consolidation are, by his own admission, less than fully convincing.
Who should read it
Readers interested in the history of American media consolidation, or in the deeper roots of the net-neutrality debate Wu himself helped ignite, will find this a genuinely illuminating account of patterns that recur across a century of very different technologies. It will frustrate readers looking for a rigorously tested general theory — the book's own evidence for a cycle, as opposed to a one-time historical pattern that broke down after mid-century, is thinner in its second half than its first.
About the author
Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University who coined the term "network neutrality" in a 2003 academic paper and has since served in senior technology-policy roles at the Federal Trade Commission, the National Economic Council, and the White House. He is also the author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness.