TECHNOLOGY: DAVIN O'DWYERreviews The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information EmpiresBy TimWu Atlantic Books, 366pp. £19.99
IN MARCH the New York Timescarried a disturbing report from its Beijing bureau. An entrepreneur, talking to his fiancee on his mobile phone in China, quoted Shakespeare: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." And then something worrying happened, according to the report: "The second time he said the word 'protest', her phone cut off." The word "protest", spoken in English, was enough to alert China's telecommunications-monitoring system that dissent might be in the air.
This chilling incident illustrates how vulnerabile are our information networks, and how vulnerable that makes us. The Chinese situation is particularly egregious, but it demonstrates what happens when control of our modes of communication becomes centralised and closed.
As Tim Wu explains in great detail in this masterful analysis of US information networks over the past century, the history of communications technology is ultimately a history of corporate power. Wu, a Columbia law professor and long-time digital-rights advocate, suggests that information networks adhere to what he calls “the Cycle”: from early telephony to film production, from radio to television, they inevitably go from being “a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system”. Ultimately, power over the information networks ends up being concentrated so comprehensively that there is, in effect, a “master switch”. It doesn’t need to be wielded as dramatically as it is in China for the implications to be grave.
Wu describes the early history of these industries in the US, and the optimism that accompanies such innovation, before charting their inevitable hijack by corporate control. The archetypal information monopolist in the US is ATT, the telecommunications behemoth that repeatedly displayed a Rasputin-like capacity to survive attempts to kill it. For more than a century ATT exploited its dominant position to stymie competitors and dramatically hinder innovation. It was eventually broken up after an antitrust investigation, but has gradually re-formed – the pattern of the Cycle continues, it seems.
But Wu’s central question is whether the internet will also end up falling prey to the Cycle, with a small number of all-powerful corporations, such as network operators and content providers, controlling what happens in the digital commons. By design the internet is an open system, resistant to centralised control, but it is still composed of physical cables and wireless spectrum, so what’s to stop the owners of the pipes and the mobile networks exerting control and charging tolls? Back in 2002 Wu coined the phrase “net neutrality” to describe the principle of forcing the various owners of the pipe – whether that is ATT, Eircom or whoever else – to treat all the information on, and all the users of, the network equally. If the principle of net neutrality is compromised the potential for carrier abuse, and monopolist entrenchment, would be greatly increased.
This might seem like a rather esoteric topic, but Wu is persuasive in arguing why we should all care what happens to our information networks and who controls them. “Just as you are what you eat,” he writes, “how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.”
Although Wu is an advocate of effective regulation – indeed, he advises the Obama administration – he is not blind to the risks of regulatory capture. He suggests a guiding “separation principle” to ensure that “those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access must be kept apart from one another”.
The most obvious limitation of The Master Switch, however, is its US-centrism. This is understandable, given how many information technologies were pioneered there, but it is also problematic in that US patterns of government regulation are considerably weaker than is the case in, say, Europe. Without a more international range of case studies it's difficult to determine whether the Cycle is the ironclad rule Wu claims it is or just the inevitable consequence of an economic terrain that's hostile to effective regulation. If it's the former, then The Master Switchstands as a persuasive call to vigilance; if it's the latter, then it's possible that Wu doth protest too much.
Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist
