Master Switch

* Book: Tim Wu. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.. 2010

Wu argues powerfully that policies like net neutrality are necessary also to protect noneconomic ideals like free speech. [1]

Description

BROOKE GLADSTONE:

"Interested in where the internet was headed, Columbia law professor Tim Wu sought an answer in the history of information technologies. He discovered that in the last 150 years, the telegraph, telephone, movies, radio and television each followed a distinct cycle. And that cycle, as he argues in his new book The Master Switch (2010) , predicts that the openness of the internet will soon be no more.

For anyone thrilled at the wide-open freedom of the Internet, the inevitable question is how long can it last? Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University Law School, looks to history for the answer, and the answer is, not very long, unless we actively intervene. He sees a cycle in the evolution of all the other great information technologies of the last 150 years - the telegraph, the movies, radio. They start out wild and wooly until they are tamed and caged by men who would be emperors.

Their empires, monopolies like AT&T and the early TV networks, wielded extraordinary power over the delivery and often the content of the information all of us received, a power described by a CBS executive in the 1950s as, quote: "the exclusive custody of the master switch".

In his book, called The Master Switch, Tim Wu describes the cycle that transforms a technological revolution into a monopoly. Consider the telephone. What started as a promising but buggy invention by Alexander Graham Bell turned into a juggernaut in the hands of empire builder Theodore Vail." (http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2011/01/master-switch.html)

Reviews

David Siegfried:

"A veteran of Silicon Valley and professor at Columbia University, Wu is an author and policy advocate best known for coining the term net neutrality. Although the Internet has created a world of openness and access unprecedented in human history, Wu is quick to point out that the early phases of telephony, film, and radio offered similar opportunities for the hobbyist, inventor, and creative individual, only to be centralized and controlled by corporate interests, monopolized, broken into smaller entities, and then reconsolidated. Wu calls this the Cycle, and nowhere is it more exemplary than in the telecommunications industry. The question Wu raises is whether the Internet is different, or whether we are merely in the early open phase of a technology that is to be usurped and controlled by profiteering interests. Central in the power struggle is the difference between the way Apple Computer and Google treat content, with Apple attempting to control the user experience with slick products while Google endeavors to democratize content, giving the user choice and openness. This is an essential look at the directions that personal computing could be headed depending on which policies and worldviews come to dominate control over the Internet. " (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/01/wu)

Frank Pasquale:

"I could either be describing Robert Lee Hale or Tim Wu. Both have addressed “private coercive power” backed by the state. Hale addressed public utilities’ exploitation of their monopoly position. Wu has analogized the internet to the electric grid, reasoning that the grid’s “general purpose and neutral nature” enabled “waves of innovation.” Rejecting laissez-faire, Wu observes that a “pure [market plus] antitrust approach is inadequate for any of the main ‘public callings,’ i.e., the businesses of money, transport, communications, and energy” (303). Hale also recognized the case for regulation in such industries. Wu forcefully demonstrates that we are entering an era of digital “public callings,” by comparing companies like Apple to media and communications barons of old.

But the vast differences between Hale’s Freedom Through Law (1952) and Wu’s The Master Switch (2010) speak volumes about changes in the American political climate over the past six decades. Hale’s work chronicled the gradual victory of democratic constraints over arbitrary and exploitative business practices. Wu acknowledges those victories, but is often more interested in the dark and collusive forces of capture (83, 312) than the promise of enlightened regulation. Hale saw coercive private power everywhere, but Wu concludes that norms now restrain it: “rare is the firm willing to assert an intention and a right to dominate layers of the information industry beyond its core business” (314). Hale discussed the “principles for determining how the wealth of the community should be distributed” (541), patiently detailing the case law of ratemaking and taxation in the first half of the 20th century. Wu’s book is postmaterialist, more interested in the cultural and political impacts of our information age giants than the grubby details of what they charge.

Wu’s emphasis on culture and freedom to tinker makes his book a much better read than Hale’s. Wu regales the reader with stories of high-power dinner parties and casual comments from powerbrokers ranging from Theodore Vail to Eric Schmidt. His prose is a tour de force, animating “industrial wars” long entombed in dry-as-dust tomes." (http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/02/the-master-switch-symposium-from-hale-to-wu.html)

Interview

"BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you say that American culture in general seems to acknowledge that political power needs to be curbed, but there's a resistance to the notion that economic power needs to be curbed.

TIM WU: Yeah, we do have a big, powerful federal government but we are constantly asking whether it needs to be less powerful, rolled back, what its limits are.

In contrast, the American attitude towards private power, while it has its moments, is much more forgiving. We allow, when we have a massive economic crisis like we just had, we say, well, that's just kind of the way it works instead of doubting our fundamental approach to these things.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you suggest that these times and this new technology calls for something you call "the separations principle".

TIM WU: We need a sensitivity towards over-consolidation between the people who move information and the people who create it. The, the point is that when you have an over-consolidation of transporting content you can have an influence over politics. You can end up with private censorship. You can end up with suppression of new innovation. And I think we need a principle like separation of church and state, where we say, you know, these are nice institutions but they need to retain some distance.

If, for example, Verizon and Google get too close together, if AT&T and Facebook want to become a single company, there are dangers from that.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What would the dangers be?

TIM WU: What would the dangers be? So Google and AT&T merging would result in a world in which it would be almost impossible to displace Google as the nation's dominant search engine. It could insulate itself against competition even after it had become antiquated or, or lost its edge, and it could also begin to favor certain companies over others on its search and would have a power over what Americans hear that would be close to unprecedented in American life.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay, so you suggest that the separations principle requires three active sets of participants, first, the federal government, then the entertainment, information and technology companies -

TIM WU: Right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: - and then us.

TIM WU: The federal government has to provide some oversight of this, but most important of all, I think it is essential that it is a norm, that we see this as something that is dangerous, that we understand in history this has produced problems, because we're used to, on the Internet, the idea you can reach anything you want. That is the separations principle in action.

Now, over the summer when the news leaked that Google and Verizon had done a secret deal there was a lot of outrage. And I think that that shows that the public is sensitive to these sorts of issues." (http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2011/01/master-switch.html)

Discussion

Proposed Interpretative Framework

by Katherine Strandburg:

"1. Open v. closed.

The Master Switch frames the history of the information industries as a Cycle between paradigms labeled “open” and “closed.” It seems to me that this analytic structure may obscure some important diversity of degrees and kinds of “openness” and “closedness.” Among important types of openness are open access (anyone can use the technology), open dissemination (anyone can sell or otherwise disseminate the technology), open “connection” (anyone can interface with the technology to make complementary goods), and open follow-on (information is revealed to permit anyone to build upon the technology).

Even this catalog is quite over-simplified since openness of any of these types is often more accessible to some (those with money? those with absorptive capacity?) than to others. For example, where one sees knowledge sharing among technological innovators, the sharing often confined within a particular community. Historical studies (see, for example, Allen’s and Meyer’s fascinating studies of collective invention and von Hippel’s studies of innovative communities) and theoretical modeling (see, for example, Bessen’s terrific recent paper) suggest that there is often something else going on – perhaps a repeat player dynamic of reciprocal openness or an insurgency in which innovators of a new technology make common cause against the market dominance of an old technology.

“Open” and “closed” are thus complex concepts that perhaps could use some further unpacking than is reflected in the Cycle framework. These different kinds of openness need not coexist and may sometimes (perhaps often?) be in tension with one another. Different types of openness may well have different social consequences, potentially creating different winners and losers and different varieties of the “human flourishing” that Paul Ohm correctly emphasizes in his Symposium post.

Google, for example, is held up as a paradigm of openness in The Master Switch, yet in many very important ways Google is anything but open. Google’s search technology is open primarily in the sense of access by searchers and “connection” by those who are the subjects of search. It is quite closed in the senses of both dissemination and follow-on innovation. Google’s algorithms are patented and protected by trade secrecy and its databases of information about users and their searches (which are crowd-sourced entirely from users themselves) are also protected by secrecy. To call Google open is, for better or worse, implicitly to privilege certain kinds of openness. It may be important to surface these distinctions.

As a general matter – and not just in the information arena – companies prefer their inputs to be open and their outputs to be closed. This creates the competition between layers that Tim seeks to preserve with his Separation Principle. Sensitivity to the distinctions between types of openness seems necessary in order to implement that principle. I suspect that the question of what should constitute a separate “layer” is likely to be a moving target. Divisions between providers of “pipes,” content, and communication services are likely to blur conceptually and not just as a matter of corporate consolidation. Moreover, one of the ways in which the Internet really is “different,” in my view, is the extent to which it is becoming not only an essential communication platform, but fully intertwined with and indistinguishable from offline social and commercial life. Describing the Internet as providing communication services and content is increasingly unsatisfying — one has only to think of a social media site like Facebook to see this point. Who will decide what is a layer and how will layers subject to a Separation Principle be defined when life in the intertwined online/offline world is so fluidly evolving? In this respect, I am intrigued by Tim’s emphasis on social norms as a source of information about where the Separation Principle should apply since it seems that distinctions between different layers may be a difficult moving target for regulators.

2. Formalized v. Unformalized.

I benefited greatly this week from the serendipity of having Jim Bessen as the guest speaker at NYU’s Innovation Policy Colloquium. Jim’s paper, “Communicating Technical Knowledge,” our discussions, and the background reading we assigned to the students in preparation helped me begin to “formalize” in my mind a second reaction to The Master Switch and its open/closed paradigm (and a similar reaction to Jonathan Zittrain’s terrific The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It). Jim’s recent work emphasizes the fact that communication is costly not primarily because of the cost of transmitting information, but because of the cost of formalizing knowledge so that it is accessible to particular learners. The distinction between formalized and unformalized knowledge is important in thinking about the openness of technology because formalization (sometimes called codification) and openness, while conceptually distinct, are often linked as a practical matter. Thus, unformalized knowledge is, for a variety of reasons, frequently shared openly within particular communities whose members have the training, experience, and background knowledge (“absorptive capacity”) to make use of it. At the same it may be inaccessible to outsiders. Sometimes unformalized knowledge is confined within a particular community intentionally as a way to keep an exclusive hold on it (think medieval guilds, perhaps), while other times it stays within a particular community because it is expensive to formalize it and/or expensive to develop the absorptive capacity to use it (think surgical techniques, perhaps). The extent to which knowledge is socially useful depends heavily on both its availability and its degree of formalization (which is related to the amount of absorptive capacity necessary to employ it). The use of the word “open” can sometimes obscure this distinction. Hence, for example, while open source software code is openly available to those who want to build upon it in accordance with the applicable license, its degree of formalization is such that only a limited group of people have the absorptive capacity to do so. Moreover, formalization, like openness, takes a variety of forms, which determine its usefulness to distinct groups of potential users. The formalization of writing down the source code makes software useful to those who want to build upon or modify it, while the formalization of embedding it in an artifact or a “user-friendly” device makes it useful to those who want to use it to do something else. These types of formalization are distinct and result in distinct types of openness. A device that is optimal for tinkerers may not be amenable to widespread use. This matters, of course, because technological devices are tools, which can often be used to create great social value when they are widely used. The codification of knowledge into artifacts, in particular, is critical to openness as access and dissemination.

Openness is not a monolithic trait of technology. Technologies can be open for some purposes and closed for others, open to some users and inaccessible to others. The formalization of knowledge in particular ways can open it to some uses and users and close it to others. These distinctions should be foregrounded in our thinking about how to pursue socially productive information policy." (http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/02/the-master-switch-symposium-open-and-closed-unformalized-and-formalized.html)

Author Bio

"Tim Wu is a policy advocate, a professor at Columbia Law School, and the chairman of media reform organization Free Press. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard’s 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine." (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2011/01/13/tim-wu-on-the-master-switch-audio/)

More Information

1. Audio: Tim Wu on the Master Switch [2]