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 →
I want to thank Tim Wu for continuing to engage in a discussion here about his book, The Master Switch, with his various comments to my ongoing rants. After pouring out about 15,000 words over the past 4 days, I suspect I’m beginning to sound a bit like his cyber-stalker! I feel a bit bad about this because I really do like Tim a lot and find him to be one of the all-around coolest and most laid-back guys in the Net policy business. But, as I’ve noted in my ongoing series [see parts 1, 2, 3, & 4], we have profoundly different worldviews when it comes to information history and policy. And some of the recent comments he made to my 3rd post deserve a serious response.
In one of those comments he asks, “The question, then, is how you get, essentially, limited, controlled government in regulatory affairs; how you duplicate, in some sense, the limits imposed on other dangerous gov’t functions like the army. I don’t think this is having things both ways; I think this is trying to learn from what has gone wrong in the past.” In the other, he says: “The question I’m asking in the end of the book is whether we can do better; try to have rules against the worse forms abuse without a creeping regulation that turns into capture. I suspect you think that’s impossible, but I don’t.”
So, here’s my response (and I’m making it a new, dedicated post here instead of just a comment in an old thread because I feel we are getting to the heart of the difference between cyber-libertarians (like myself) and cyber-collectivists (or whatever Tim would call himself). Continue reading →
After posting the first three installments of my ongoing look at Tim Wu’s important new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, [see parts 1, 2, & 3], I’ve heard back from some readers as well as Prof. Wu himself that I may be going a bit hard on him, or that I am under-appreciating some of his valid critiques. In particular, Wu and others have claimed I’ve ignored or downplayed his admission that the problem of regulatory capture is a prime culprit of “the cycle” he addresses in his book. So, let me address that point here today.
I have acknowledged that Prof. Wu’s book includes some occasional references to the problem of regulatory capture or bureaucratic bungling throughout the history of communications and media policy. In a comment to my previous post, Wu itemizes a couple of those instances, most of which I’d already cited before. But here’s probably the best passage from the book on this point:
Again and again in the histories I have recounted, the state has shown itself an inferior arbiter of what is good for the information industries. The federal government’s role in radio and television from the 1920s through the 1960s, for instance, was nothing short of a disgrace…. Government’s tendency to protect large market players amounts to an illegitimate complicity … [particularly its] sense of obligation to protect big industries irrespective of their having become uncompetitive. (p. 308)
I agree. And, as I also noted in my previous essay, I very much appreciated this footnote in chapter 3 of Wu’s book: “The technical term for such a system is ‘corporatism’: in its extreme manifestation it is called ‘fascism.” Wu is absolutely right. I applaud him for labeling this system what it really is.
But here’s what’s so damn peculiar about Wu and his book when it comes to the problem of regulatory capture and bureaucratic mismanagement: as soon as he raises it, he immediately walks away from it. There’s seemingly never any serious lesson drawn from it. Continue reading →
This is the third installment in a series of essays about Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. As I noted in my first essay, Wu’s book promises to make waves in Internet policy circles, so I’m devoting some space here to debunking what I regard as some of the myths that drive his hyper-pessimistic worldview regarding the supposed death of openness. In my second essay, I challenged Wu’s view of technological “cycles” and “market failure” and noted that he paints an overly simplistic portrait of both. In a similar vein, in this installment I will address Wu’s mistaken claim that purely free markets and “laissez-faire” have guided America’s communications and media sectors over the past century.
Wu’s narrative in The Master Switch is heavily dependent upon his retelling of the histories of several major sectors: telephony, film, broadcast radio, and cable television. After surveying the history of those sectors throughout the past century, Wu concludes that “the purely economic laissez-faire approach… is no longer feasible” (p. 303) and that a fairly sweeping new regulatory regime – which I will address in a forthcoming post – is necessary to address the imperfections of the free market.
As any serious historian of the past century of information industries knows, however, we’ve never had anything remotely resembling a “purely economic laissez-faire approach” to communications, media or information policy in this country. We’ve had a mixed system that allowed a certain degree of market activity accompanied by very heavy doses of “public interest” regulation. Indeed, the story of 20th century communications and media markets is one of artificial barriers to entry, government (mis-)allocation of key resources (like spectrum), price controls, rate-of-return regulations, speech controls and mandates, regulatory capture, and good ‘ol boy corporatism. Continue reading →
Tim Wu was kind enough to comment on my general overview and critique of his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. That essay will be the first of many I plan to pen about Wu’s important book. I appreciate Prof. Wu being willing to engage me in a debate over some of these issues since I’m sure he has better things to do with his time. Some of the points he raised in his comment will be addressed in subsequent posts.
In this post, I want to respond briefly to his assertion that I was “missing the point of the book” which is “to describe the world we live in.” He says that his book, “suggests that we tend to go through open and closed cycles in the Information Industries, and that, roughly, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both become popular at different times for various reasons.” But he fears there are “greater risks in the closed periods.”
Contrary to what he suggests, I certainly understand that’s the point of his book, it’s just that I don’t fully agree with his analysis or conclusions. Let me be clear about a crucial point, however: I accept that almost every industry goes through “cycles” of some sort and that, typically, after a “Wild West” period of greater “openness” and more atomistic competition, some degree of “consolidation” or more “closed” (or proprietary) models often sets in. (A somewhat different and far more descriptive interpretation of such cycles can be found in Deborah Spar’s 2001 book, Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from Compass to the Internet. She outlines a more refined 4-part cycle of: Innovation, Commercialization, Creative Anarchy, and Rules.)
My primary beef with Prof. Wu is that, contrary to his assertion yesterday in commenting on my post, his book seems to regard the progression of “the Cycle” as mostly linear and one-directional: straight down toward a perfectly closed, corporate-controlled, anti-consumer Hell. By my reading of his book – much like Lessig and Zittrain’s work – Wu is painting an overly pessimistic portrait of technologies being subjected to the “perfect control” of largely unfettered markets.
I believe history – especially recent history — teaches us something very different. Continue reading →
Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, will be released next week and it promises to make quite a splash in cyberlaw circles. It will almost certainly go down as one of the most important info-tech policy books of 2010 and will probably win the top slot in my next end-of-year list.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I agree with everything in it. In fact, I disagree vehemently with Wu’s general worldview and recommendations, and even much of his retelling of the history of information sectors and policy. Nonetheless, for reasons I will discuss in this first of many critiques, the book’s impact will be significant because Wu is a rock star in this academic arena as well as a committed activist in his role as chair of the radical regulatory activist group, Free Press. Through his work at Free Press as well as the New America Foundation, Professor Wu is attempting to craft a plan of action to reshape the Internet and cyberspace.
I stand in opposition to almost everything that Wu and those groups stand for, thus, I will be spending quite a bit of time addressing his perspectives and proposals here in coming months, just as I did when Jonathan Zittrain’s hugely important The Future of the Internet & How to Stop It was released two years ago (my first review is here and my latest critique is here). In today’s essay, I’ll provide a general overview and foreshadow my critiques to come. (Note: Tim was kind enough to have his publisher send me an advance uncorrected proof of the book a few months ago, so I’ll be using that version to construct these critiques. Please consult the final version for cited material and page numbers.) Continue reading →
(Second in a series.)
I recently picked up a copy of Robert Wuthnow’s Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation, Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats. According to the dust cover, the Princeton sociologist’s book “examines the human response to existential threats…” Contrary to common belief, we do not deny such threats but “seek ways of positively meeting the threat, of doing something—anything—even if it’s wasteful and time-consuming.” Interesting batch of ideas, no?
Well, the fifth paragraph of the book joins up with some pretty obscure and disorganized writing in the introduction to disqualify it from absorbing any more of my precious time. That paragraph contains this sentence: “Millions could die from a pandemic or a dirty bomb strategically placed in a metropolitan area.”
It’s probably true that millions could die from a pandemic. Two million deaths would be just under 0.03% of the world’s population—not quite existential. But the killer for the book is Wuthnow saying that millions could die from a dirty bomb placed in a metropolitan area. There will never be that many deaths from a dirty bomb, placed anywhere, ever.
One suspects that the author doesn’t know what a dirty bomb is. A dirty bomb is a combination of conventional explosives and radioactive material that is designed to disperse the radioactive material over a wide area. A dirty bomb is not a nuclear explosive and its lethality is little greater than a conventional weapon, as the radiological material is likely to be too dispersed and too weak to cause serious health issues.
Dirty bombs are meant to scare. Incautious discussion of dirty bombs has induced more fright in our society than any actual bomb. Professor Wuthnow asserts, as fact, that a dirty bomb could kill millions, which is plainly wrong. If he doesn’t know his subject matter, he doesn’t get any more time from this reader.
Given my brief experience with the book, I advise you to be very afraid of Be Very Afraid.
Although I won’t be able to get around to penning a formal review of it for a couple more weeks, I was excited to get a copy of Milton Mueller‘s new book, Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance, in the mail today. I looks like a terrific treatment of some important cyberlaw issues. Here’s the summary:
Mueller identifies four areas of conflict and coordination that are generating a global politics of Internet governance: intellectual property, cyber-security, content regulation, and the control of critical Internet resources (domain names and IP addresses). He investigates how recent theories about networked governance and peer production can be applied to the Internet, offers case studies that illustrate the Internet’s unique governance problems, and charts the historical evolution of global Internet governance institutions, including the formation of a transnational policy network around the WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society).
As a fan of Net-related political taxonomies and philosophical paradigms, I couldn’t help but quickly jump ahead to the very interesting concluding chapter on “Ideologies and Visions,” in which Mueller examines “the political spectrum of Internet governance.” There, on page 268, I was very excited to see this statement in his section on “Elements of Denationalized Liberalism”: Continue reading →
I’m preparing what will become another one of my absurdly long and boring book reviews and this time it’s Tim Wu’s new book — The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires — that will be under the microscope. As with many of the books I review, I’m going to go pretty hard on it, especially since I disagree with Tim on so many fronts. But I appreciate his willingness to engage a kooky libertarian like me and the fact that he shared an early proof of the book with me so I could prepare a review.
Nonetheless, I figured I would pre-empt the pain to come by posting a short comment here about one portion of the book with which I find myself in violent agreement. Chapter 16 of Wu’s book is a short history of cable television and it includes a brief discussion of a favorite theory of many Internet pessimists: the notion that the increased personalization or customization that Internet brings us will lead to a variety of potential ills, including: homogenization, close-mindedness, an online echo-chamber, information overload, or corporate brainwashing. Their greatest fear seems to be that hyper-customization of websites and online technologies will cause extreme social “fragmentation,” “polarization,” “balkanization,” “extremism” and even the supposed decline of deliberative democracy. Continue reading →
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