by Tim Wu
17. Ibid.
18. Ryan Singel, “AT&T Sued Over NSA Eavesdropping,” Wired.com, January 31, 2006, available at www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70126. The Los Angeles Times also reported on the cooperation between AT&T and the NSA. Josh Meyer and Joseph Menn, “U.S. Spying Is Much Wider, Some Suspect,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2005.
19. The United States moved to intervene on May 13, 2006: http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2006cv00672/175966/123/. The United States also moved to dismiss, invoking the state secrets privilege: http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2006cv00672/175966/124/. To read the final opinion, see Hepting v. AT&T Corp., 539 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008).
20. The measure amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 and granted retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that assisted in surveillance. FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-261, 122 Stat. 2436 (codified in scattered sections of 50 U.S.C.). Obama’s remark is quoted in Eric Lichtblau, “Senate Approves Bill to Broaden Wiretap Powers,” New York Times, July 10, 2008.
21. Whitacre’s retirement was reported in Matt Richtel, “AT&T Chief Who Weathered a Sea Change Is Retiring in June,” New York Times, April 28, 2007. See also Dionne Searcey, “A Pension to Retire For,” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2007.
CHAPTER 19: A SURPRISING WRECK
1. As told to The New York Times in Tim Arango, “How the AOL–Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” New York Times, January 10, 2010. For other sources on the AOL–Time Warner merger, see Johnnie L. Roberts, “How It All Fell Apart,” Newsweek, December 9, 2002, and three books: Nina Munk, Fools Rush In (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Alec Klein, Stealing TIME: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003); and Kara Swisher, There Must Be a Pony In Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future (New York: Crown Business, 2003).
2. Case and Levin had also served together on the board of the New York Stock Exchange. Munk, Fools Rush In, 137.
3. Ibid., 74–76.
4. The succession, of course, was a story of corporate intrigue, and involved the ouster of Steven Ross and Levin’s joint enemy, Nick Nickolas, who was technically co-CEO with Ross and ought logically to have been Ross’s successor. See Christopher Byron, “As Ross Lay Dying,” New York magazine, January 4, 1993, 12. On Levin’s career, see, e.g., Klein, Stealing TIME, 80.
5. Levin was quoted in Roberts, “How It All Fell Apart,” cited above. Ted Turner’s full quote appears in Saul Hansell, “Media Megadeal: The Overview,” New York Times, January 11, 2000.
6. Steve Lohr, “AOL Merger Turns Tables on Microsoft,” New York Times, January 12, 2000.
7. Kramer defends the AOL–Time Warner merger in Larry Kramer, “Why the AOL–Time Warner Merger Was a Good Idea,” The Daily Beast, Blogs and Stories, May 4, 2009, available at www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-04/how-time-warner-blew-it/.
8. You can find the old Pathfinder site on the Internet Archive, http://archive.org.
9. On Disney’s total merchandising strategy, see “All the Movies Are Geared to Publicizing … and Making Money,” Newsweek, December 1962, 48–51.
10. This figure was at the time of the merger. Klein, Stealing TIME, 259.
11. Ken Auletta, Media Man: Ted Turner’s Improbable Empire, 96.
12. The FTC and FCC both imposed conditions on the merger, including the “open access” provision referred to in the text, as well as conditions designed to maintain an open market for instant messaging, then thought to be a crucial platform for the future. See “In the Matter of America Online, Inc., and Time Warner Inc., File No. 001 0105, Docket No. C-3989; Applications for Consent to the Transfer of Control of Licenses and Section 214 Authorizations by Time Warner Inc. and America Online, Inc., Transferors, to AOL Time Warner Inc., Transferee,” 16 FCC Rcd. 6547 (2001).
13. Jay Greene, “Case vs. Gates: Playing for the Web Jackpot,” BusinessWeek, June 18, 2001, 42.
14. The power of states to shape the nature of the Internet is the topic of my first book, coauthored with Jack Goldsmith. See Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith, Who Controls the Internet (New York: Oxford, 2006).
CHAPTER 20: FATHER AND SON
1. The quotes in this chapter from Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt are drawn from the 2007 Macworld conference in San Francisco, or from a February 2010 interview with Eric Schmidt. Jobs’s entire keynote address from the 2007 Macworld event may be viewed at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf07/ (last visited March 2010).
2. This title is official; see Google’s “Corporate Information” website, www.google.com/corporate/execs.html (last visited March 2010).
3. Tim Bray’s comment was made on a personal blog but cleared by Google and widely attributed to it. The blog post is at www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google.
4. This quote is drawn from the 1927 essay referenced throughout this book: Aldous Huxley, “The Outlook for American Culture,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1927.
5. One particularly interesting history of Wozniak and Jobs’s initial meeting and development of what would eventually become Apple, as well as the reinvention of the company in recent years with the development of popular modern Apple technology, may be found in Michael Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple, and How It Changed the World (New York: Overlook, 2009). Other descriptions of the early history of Apple include Roy A. Allen, A History of the Personal Computer: The People and the Technology (London, Ontario: Allen Publishing, 2001), 36.
6. This quote, as well as much of the Wozniakcentric information in this chapter, is drawn from Steve Wozniak’s autobiography, iWoz—Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 103.
7. Wozniak said this at his talk at Columbia University on September 28, 2006.
8. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: Penguin, 2009); Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: William Morrow, 1974). Pirsig’s book, while generally taken as a meditation on spirituality and technology, actually spends more time on complex epistemological questions that are hard to summarize. Wozniak, iWoz, 291.
9. This quote is from Leander Kahney, “How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong,” Wired, March 18, 2008. In the article, Kahney also questions Apple and Google’s supposedly close relationship: “By Google’s definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future.” The book he was promoting with this article: Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain (New York: Penguin, 2008).
10. Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 157.
11. The New York Times story is “Psychology of Telephone Girls,” New York Times, April 4, 1912. The effect of the financial panic on the telephone girls is described in Casson, History of the Telephone, 155.
12. The idea of describing Google as a switch comes from my colleague Charles Sabel at Columbia.
13. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Googlization of Everything: How One Company Is Transforming Culture, Commerce, and Community and Why We Should Worry (London: Profile Books, 2010).
14. This particular corporate tradition is described in Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production,” New Media & Society 11 (2009): 145.
15. As quoted in, among other places, Janet Lowe, Google Speaks (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 39. Google’s origins at Stanford are described in John Battelle, The Search (New York: Portfolio, 2005).
16. “At SBC, It’s All About ‘Scale and Scope,’ ” BusinessWeek, November 7, 2005.
17. SkyNews, interview with Rupert Murdoch, November 9, 2009, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI&feature=player_e
mbedded.
18. These predictions form the thesis of Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
19. According to Wozniak, in an interview with Wired magazine. See Rachel Metz, “iWoz Logs Leap from Geek to Icon,” Wired.com, August 24, 2006, available at www.wire.com/gadgets/mac/news/2006/08/7164.
20. The blog post can be found at googleblog.blogspot.com/2007-11-wheres-my-gphone.html.
21. For example, in a 2007 press release, Verizon announced it was committed to allowing any wireless device and any app on its network. See news.vzw.com/news/2007/11/pr2007-11-27.html.
22. The best account of such a future is a novel by Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (New York: Tor Books, 2003); it is also the evident vision of the Burning Man festival. On the relationship between the tech world and Burning Man, see Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google,” 145.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Wu is an author, a policy advocate, and a professor at Columbia University. In 2006 he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard’s one hundred most influential graduates. He writes for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes. He is a fellow of the New America Foundation and the chairman of the media reform organization Free Press.