OK, so I’ve spent a week harassing Tim Wu and hammering away at the thesis, conclusions, and recommendations found in his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. After pouring out about 17,000 words across six essays [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] over the past week, I want to thank Tim for not seeking a restraining order against me for being his cyber-stalker during this period! Moreover, he has responded to several of my rants here with stoic dignity. I appreciate that, too. I would have been screaming mad if someone attacked one of my books this relentlessly!
Anyway, in the spirit of fair play, I want to offer Professor Wu the opportunity to respond more formally here on the Tech Liberation Front. We need to do more of that here, and I feel bad that I didn’t make available to Jonathan Zittrain a similar opportunity when I was stalking him after the release of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 + video!) I am happy, however, that Jerry Brito posted here today this podcast he did with Prof. Wu so that we could hear him in his own words.
Anyway, I’ve just sent a note to Tim extending an invitation to formally respond even if he chooses to just compile some of the other comments he’s already made here, or to post something more substantive (even excerpts from the book). If he decides to take us up on the offer, I’ll post it his comments here. In the meantime, I want to encourage people to buy Tim’s book and judge it for themselves. Despite my deep disagreements with The Master Switch, it’s absolutely one of the most important information technology policy books of the past decade and it belongs on your bookshelf if you care about these issues. And I look forward to many more friendly fights with Tim in the future!
I’m going to close out my series of essays about Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, by discussing his proposed solutions. In the first five essays in the series, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] I’ve critiqued Wu’s look at information history as well as his use of terms like “market failure,” “laissez-faire” and “open” vs. “closed.” I argued there’s a great deal of over-simplification, even outright distortion, in his use of those terms throughout the book.
Anyway, let’s run through the basics of the book once more before getting to Wu’s proposed solutions. By my reading of The Master Switch, Wu’s argument essentially goes something like this:
- Information industries go through cycles. After a period of “openness” and competition, they tend to drift toward “closed,” corporate-controlled, anti-consumer models and outcomes.
- The resulting “monopolists” then block much innovation, competition, and free speech.
- Consequently, “the purely economic laissez-faire approach… is no longer feasible.”
- Moreover, information industries are more important than all others (“information industries… can never be properly understood as ‘normal’ industries”) and even traditional forms of regulation, including antitrust, “are clearly inadequate for the regulation of information industries.” (p. 303).
- Thus, special rules should apply to information-related sectors of our economy.
Again, I’ve challenged some of these assertions in my previous essays, specifically, Wu’s incomplete history of cycles and the fact that he greatly underplays the role of governments in “locking-in” sub-optimal market structures or, worse yet, creating those structures through misguided public policies or regulatory capture. Wu discusses some of those factors in his book, but he tends to regard them as secondary to the inquiry, whereas I believe they are crucial to understanding how most “closed” or anti-competitive scenarios develop or endure. Instead, Wu simplistically suggests that “the purely economic laissez-faire approach… is no longer feasible,” even though no such state of affairs has ever existed within communications or media industries. They have been subjected to varying levels of indirect influence or direct control almost since their inception.
Regardless, what does Tim Wu want done about the problems he has (mis-)diagnosed? Continue reading →
Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, the chair of media reform group Free Press, and a writer for Slate, discusses his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Wu’s book documents the history of media industries in the United States and speculates on what that history teaches us about the future. On the podcast, he discusses Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of innovation, cycles of open and closed competition within industries, the history of government-backed monopolies in telephone and radio, and his thoughts on the future of information empires, the internet, and regulation.
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Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Schwarzenegger v. EMA, a case that challenges California’s 2005 law banning the sale of “violent” video games to minors. The law has yet to take effect, as rulings by lower federal courts have found the law to be an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment.
There’s little doubt that banning the sale of nearly any content to adults violates the protections of Free Speech, including, as decided last year, video depictions of cruelty to animals.
But over the years the Court has ruled that minors do not stand equal to adults when it comes to the First Amendment. The Court has upheld restrictions on the speech of students in and out of the classroom, for example, in the interest of preserving order in public schools.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.