The Master Switch

by Tim Wu

  Where might the next domineering empire come from? It is impossible to predict, though history offers some good guesses. It could arise from a takeover of content by the great carriers of our time, a future whose harbinger might be the takeover of NBC-Universal by Comcast, an even vaster effort to realize what AOL Time Warner failed to be. It might arrive through some further melding of Hollywood with AT&T in the devices marketed by Apple and friends. Or it could begin on the day that mighty Google, still the greatest corporate champion of openness, decides that its survival has come to depend on integration and the elimination of whatever competition it has. Whatever the source, the prospect of a new imperial age, even if only partially visible now, seems to me as likely as it ever has been at this point in the Cycle. This time is different: with everything on one network, the potential power to control is so much greater.

  It is also possible that we could undergo such a consolidation blissfully unaware. Dazzled by ever newer toys, faster connections, sharper graphics, and more ingenious applications, we might be sufficiently distracted from the consequences of centralized control. After all, many still recall living perfectly productive and contented lives in the age of Hollywood’s Production Code or the years when a long distance phone call was an expenditure to give one pause. With systems and industrial orders changing faster and faster, however, and with virtually everyone nowadays—not only hobbyists as in days past—enjoying an astonishing variety of venues for self-expression and entrepreneurship, it is difficult to imagine a new order not coming as a very rude awakening.

  There is no escaping the reality that we have evolved into a society in which electronic information represents the substrate of much of daily life. It is a natural outcome of our having advanced past the mechanical age. And just as our addiction to the benefits of the internal combustion engine led us to such demand for fossil fuels as we could no longer support, so, too, has our dependence on our mobile smart phones, touchpads, laptops, and other devices delivered us to a moment when our demand for bandwidth—the new black gold—is insatiable. Let us, then, not fail to protect ourselves from the will of those who might seek domination of those resources we cannot do without. If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices that our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a manner history has foretold.

  * This point might be described as axiomatic in communications scholarship, and indeed the justification for the communications departments found at many universities. It is, for example, the whole premise of Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications (1950), which held, rather boldly, that the nature of various civilizations from the Egyptians onward was much the product of their communications systems. Hence, the problem of cognitive entrenchment—a problem for any part of society—is much more serious when we speak of an industry fundamental to democracy. For humans, speech—in the broad constitutional sense extending beyond simple oral or even verbal communication—has effects and purposes that transcend mere transactional utility. To offer it and to consume it can take on a spiritual dimension that ensures that a television or mobile phone can never be remotely considered, as it were, a toaster that doesn’t toast but happens to present pictures and sound. Whether we have in mind a song, a film, a political speech, or a private conversation, we are considering forms that have the potential to alter sensibilities, change lives. Every one of us has read or watched something that has made an indelible impression, impossible to quantify in relation to production and distribution costs. For such a reason did Joseph Goebbels describe radio as “the spiritual weapon of the totalitarian state.” Indeed, for such reasons is there almost always, behind every political revolution or genocide, a partnership with some kind of mass medium. That kind of claim can’t be made of orange juice, heating oil, running shoes, or dozens of other industries, no matter their size.

  * More broadly, it seems clear to me that a pure antitrust approach is inadequate for any of the main “public callings,” i.e., the businesses of money, transport, communications, and energy. One reason is fairly simple: historically, the application of those statutes has been triggered by manipulation of consumer prices and certain other very particular abuses of market power; but those aren’t the most troubling problems in this context. More subtly, there is the problem of taking an after-the-fact approach to a commodity so vital to our basic liberties: a framework that has worked well enough for oil and aluminum is ultimately unsuited to an industry whose substrate is speech.

  * It is critical to understand that I do not mean a constitutional principle in the formal sense, that is, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Rather, what I mean by “constitutional principle” is a norm taken as axiomatic or generally accepted to such an extent that to the degree it regulates, the regulation is a matter of self-regulation.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped me with this book. George Andreou is the best editor I have ever worked with and a fine prose stylist. Tina Bennett, my literary agent, understands writers better than they understand themselves. My dean David Schizer’s support made this book possible, and I thank the entire faculty of Columbia Law School for their support and tolerance. I thank the editors at Slate magazine, particularly Jacob Weisberg, Dahlia Lithwick and Josh Levin, for giving me room to try out many of the ideas that went into this book.

  Research assistants at Columbia Law School and the New America Foundation provided indispensable help with this book. Their ranks initially included Hailey DeKraker, the lead research assistant, Alex Middleton, who dug out the Hush-A-Phone hearings, and Luis Villa. Later help came from Anna-Marie Anderson, Kendra Marvel, and Judd Schlossberg, who provided research rescue at a critical hour. Faith Smith at New America and her team of researchers found things I wouldn’t have thought existed, and I also thank the UCLA library, site of the Hodkinson papers. The multitalented, long-suffering Stuart Sierra did the diagrams. I also thank the reference librarians at Columbia Law School, who provided timely access to everything, the library staff at Stanford Law School, and Lily Evans at Knopf.

  Kathryn Tucker made important early suggestions and helped crystallize the idea of a Cycle at the center of the book. Scott Hemphill gave me especially useful comments, twice, and constant feedback on economic questions; other helpful assistance, ideas, and feedback came from Larry Lessig, Chris Libertelli, Charles Sabel, Derek Slater, Michael Heller, Andrew McLaughlin, Jennifer 8. Lee, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Hal Edgar, Diana Sanchez, Robert Wright, Richard Posner, Judith Judge, David Wu, and Louis Wolcher. I also feel deeply indebted to a series of authors, some of whom I have never met, who have written particularly helpful histories of communications and the media, including Paul Starr, Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon, Milton Mueller, Connie Brooks, Lawrence Lessing, Thomas White, Ken Auletta, Herbert N. Casson, and many others. I presented early versions of this book at the New America Foundation, Columbia Law School, the University of Washington, the Stanford Communications Department, the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, and the West Virginia School of Law.

  Finally, I wish to thank my family, particularly my mother, who broke our budget to buy an Apple II+ in 1982 and thereby started this book, and my in-laws, who helped me finish it. And finally thanks to Kate Judge, who helped straighten out the logic and waited patiently every time I embarked on those long train rides meant to make this book happen.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. The description of the banquet is in “Voice Voyages by the National Geographic Society: A Tribute to the Geographical Achievements of the Telephone,” National Geographic XXIX (March 1916): 296–326. Another account can be found in Albert Bigelow Paine’s biography, Theodore N. Vail: A Biography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1921).

  2. Alan Stone, How America Got Online (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 27; Annual Report of the American Telephone and Telegraph for 1910 (New York, 1911),
34; Albert Bigelow Paine, In One Man’s Life: Being Chapters from the Personal and Business Career of Theodore N. Vail (New York: Harper & Bros., 1921), 213–14; and Allan L. Benson, “The Wonderful New World Ahead of Us,” The Cosmopolitan (February 1911): 294, 302.

  3. Nikola Tesla, “The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires,” Electrical World and Engineer, 1904. D. W. Griffith is quoted in Richard Dyer MacCann, The First Film Makers (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989), 5. Sloan Foundation, On the Cable (1971). Tom Stoppard’s character Jackson makes this remark and then exclaims, “Electricity is going to change everything! Everything!” Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 53.

  4. Authors Frank Manuel and Fritzie Manuel discuss the age of the Utopia Victoriana in Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1979), 759. The other great influence on Vail’s time was Frederick Taylor—his theories of scientific management and the concept of the “one right way.” The classic is Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911); see, generally, Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988).

  5. See Annual Report of the American Telephone and Telegraph for 1910, 36; and “Public Utilities and Public Policy,” Atlantic Monthly (1913): 309. These articles are reprinted in Theodore N. Vail, Views on Public Questions: A Collection of Papers and Addresses of Theodore Newton Vail (privately printed, 1917), 111.

  6. Annual Report of the American Telephone and Telegraph for 1910, 36.

  7. Ibid.; Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Company, 1922), 2.

  8. Aldous Huxley’s diary of his long journey through several countries and his experience reading Henry Ford’s autobiography along the way is in Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930).

  9. These observations on human equality and the social order may be found in Henry Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1922), 10, 3.

  10. Huxley’s early impressions of American culture and the revolutionary changes being wrought by advances in communications technology may be read in Aldous Huxley, “The Outlook for American Culture: Some Reflections in a Machine Age,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1927.

  11. Joseph Goebbels, “Der Rundfunk als achte Großmacht,” Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1938), 197–207. On the Lucy ratings, see Gary Edgerton, The Columbia History of American Television (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 134.

  CHAPTER 1: THE DISRUPTIVE FOUNDER

  1. There are, unsurprisingly, many useful histories of the Bell Company and AT&T. For the pre-1984 history, see Herbert Newton Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 24–25; N. R. Danielian, AT&T: The Story of Industrial Conquest (New York: Vanguard, 1939); Arthur Page, The Bell Telephone System (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941); Horace Coon, American Tel & Tel: The Story of a Great Monopoly (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1939); Sonny Kleinfeld, The Biggest Company on Earth: A Profile of AT&T (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981); John Brooks, Telephone: The First One Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

  2. William W. Fisher III, “The Growth of Intellectual Property: A History of the Ownership of Ideas in the United States,” in Intellectual Property Rights: Critical Concepts in Law, vol. I, 83, David Vaver ed., (New York: Routledge, 2006).

  3. The controversy over the invention of the telephone has engendered a small industry, including four volumes written in the twenty-first century. It begins with “How Gray Was Cheated,” New York Times, May 22, 1886; see also A. Edward Evenson, The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray–Alexander Bell Controversy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000); Burton H. Baker, The Gray Matter: The Forgotten Story of the Telephone (St. Joseph, MI: Telepress, 2000); Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); Tony Rothman, Everything’s Relative (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003). For the full Drawbaugh case, see Dolbear v. American Bell Tel. Co., 126 U.S. 1 (1888).

  4. Malcolm Gladwell, “In the Air,” New Yorker, May 12, 2008. Gladwell explores these themes further in Outliers: The Story of Success (New York; Little, Brown, 2008).

  5. Clayton M. Christensen, The Inventor’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business.

  6. Casson, History of the Telephone, 24–25.

  7. See Evenson, Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876, 65.

  8. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983), 84, 86.

  9. One account of this first successful telephonic communication is found in Charlotte Gray, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention (New York: Arcade, 2006), 123–24.

  10. A history of the Associated Press relationship with Western Union and the influence of wire-communicated news may be found in Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

  11. The text of this advertisement is in Brooks, Telephone, 60.

  12. According to some accounts, quite possibly apocryphal, Orton simply chuckled when offered the Bell patents, asking pleasantly, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” This exchange appears in Casson, History of the Telephone, 58–59.

  13. During this period, it appears that “Western Union’s strangle hold [on the industry] began to tighten into a death grip,” as described by historian John Brooks in Telephone, 70.

  14. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 106.

  15. Bell’s depression and subsequent hospitalization are recorded in Casson, History of the Telephone, 74.

  16. Schumpeter’s ideas are central to this book. Two of his works are particularly important for this work: The Theory of Economic Development; and Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2006) (1942). For more about his work see Robert Loring Allen, Opening Doors: The Life and Work of Joseph Schumpeter, Volume One—Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991); on his up-and-down life, see Richard Swedberg’s Schumpeter: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

  17. Albert Bigelow Paine, In One Man’s Life: Being Chapters from the Personal & Business Career of Theodore N. Vail (New York: Harper & Bros., 1921) 114.

  18. Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development, 93; Paine, In One Man’s Life, 27.

  19. This letter is reprinted in Casson, History of the Telephone, 67.

  20. Brooks, Coon, and Casson all give full accounts of the agreement between Western Union and Bell.

  21. Coon, American Tel & Tel, 41.

  CHAPTER 2: RADIO DREAMS

  1. An account of this boxing match at Jersey City, the first mass sportscast event, can be found in “Voice Broadcasting the Stirring Progress of the ‘Battle of the Century,’ ” The Wireless Age, August 1921, 11–21. The New York Times also covered the event, in the article “Wireless Telephone Spreads Fight News Over 120,000 Miles,” New York Times, July 3, 1921, 6.

  2. For a description and photographs of Jack Dempsey, the reigning heavyweight champion in 1921, see Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

  3. The Radio Corporation of America and David Sarnoff are key characters in this book—although famously historians have been hoodwinked by Sarnoff’s misrepresentations, so read with care. On the man and the firm, see Gleason Archer, Big Business and Radio (New York: American Historical Company, 1939); Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio (New York: Har
perCollins, 1991); and Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). Descriptions of Sarnoff’s life and work in his own words—a notably unreliable source—can be found in Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968).

  4. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (G. & C. Merriam Co., 1913), available online at http://machaut.uchicago.edu/websters.

  5. A. Frederick Collins, The Book of Wireless (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916).

  6. A description of Lee De Forest’s radio station in the Bronx can be found in Brian Regal, Radio: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 59–60.

  7. QST Magazine continues to be the publication of the American Radio Relay League. The magazine’s estimate is in “De Forest Wireless Telephone,” QST Magazine, April 1917, 72.

  8. See “Voice Broadcasting the Stirring Progress of the ‘Battle of the Century,’ ” Wireless Age, August 1921, 11.

  9. Todd Lappin discusses radio’s dramatic rise in popularity in the early 1920s, which he compares to the personal computer’s rise in the 1980s, in “Déjà Vu All Over Again,” Wired, May 1995.

  10. Lee De Forest’s encouragements are in How to Set Up an Amateur Radio Receiving Station (New York: De Forest Radio Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1920), 2–7.

  11. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Signalling and Talking by Radio,” Modern Wonder Workers: A Popular History of American Invention (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1924), 351, 378.