The internet is free, open and neutral. Anybody can use it to go anywhere they like and it is neutral because there is no control over what information flows through its networks.
The internet is, therefore, unique among communication and information systems. Telephony is controlled and access to it is expensive, radio networks are heavily regulated and monopolised by a few players, cinema is the property of the big studios, books and newspapers are also the property of big players, and television is done by a tiny elite. But, out there on the net, you can do and say what you like.
History suggests this brief golden age will soon end. All those other technologies began with promises that they would liberate the world, allowing unprecedented contact between people and access to information. But all of them failed, ending up in the same old corporate or governmental chains.
So will that happen to the internet? Tim Wu hopes not and this magisterial book explains why. Wu is a wonk, a Silicon Valley princeling and a professor at Columbia University. He will, in short, be heard and rightly so. The future of the media, specifically the internet, lies at the heart of our liberal democratic destinies. A battle is now being fought between those who aspire to maintain net freedom and those who call for regulation or seek commercial control. Wu’s sharp analysis and eye for a good story will impress any thoughtful legislator. If new media laws are to be made, this book will be a key document.
Wu does not approach the issue as a debate about competing ideologies, nor does he see the issue, as many do, as being all about state control. Rather, he shows that the way companies operate determines freedom as much as any government intervention — “In the United States,” he writes, “it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.”
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So, for example, there was Hollywood’s Hays code, a self-regulating system that lasted from 1930 to 1968 and imposed a degree of censorship — in support of decency but also of a highly repressive concept of social order — that would have interested Colonel Gadaffi. The companies did this to themselves because they were browbeaten by religious lobbyists and felt they had to obey. A public backlash against Hollywood was a terrifying prospect for this highly concentrated and consolidated business.
Consolidation is the second phase of what Wu calls the Cycle, a process of innovation, consolidation and destruction. All business sectors produce such cycles but, Wu maintains, information companies are different. Their product — know-ledge — feels as though it should be free and, indeed, that is what’s promised at the beginning of the Cycle when innovation produces a new information technology.
But the consolidation phase is when the innovators turn into businessmen pursuing monopolies and control, and when freedom of expression is often in conflict with the interests of shareholders. In this phase, the companies can also become roadblocks to innovation.
FM radio, for example, provides better sound using lower power and could have created an entirely open radio ecology if, when it was ready in 1934, it had been adopted. The consolidated radio companies suppressed the technology for decades.
Meanwhile AT&T, America’s mighty telephone company, held back the answering machine for 60 years, fearful, weirdly, that these infernal devices would stop people using their phones.
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The consolidation phase is not just bad for customers, it is bad for politics. Protected media monopolies can become arms of government. From 2002, AT&T happily spied on all the communications of America and the world in the name of the war on terror.
Luckily, the consolidation phase is cyclically subverted either by new technologies or by government intervention — AT&T had been broken up because it offended the free-market instincts of the Nixon and Reagan administrations, though it later reconsolidated.
We are now in a destruction phase. The internet is swinging like a wrecking ball through old information systems, closing newspapers and threatening the monopolies of television, music and movie companies. Will the internet evade the consolidation phase of Wu’s Cycle and stay free?
Crucially, this is a technology designed from the bottom up to be open. Unlike a rail or phone line, the internet is structurally free and open. But that does not mean it cannot be closed. The fight is now on between the old-fashioned media approach and the new, more libertarian style. For Wu, Apple is “old-fashioned” because it wants to extend a proprietorial interest through its machines, iTunes and iPad apps. Google remains “new” in its commitment to openness, giving away phone software for nothing in the hope that it will remain an internet gatekeeper. Which will prevail is unknowable.
Concluding, Wu advocates a strict separation of information functions — content providers, infrastructure and access — so no company can do more than one of them. But that would require a general consent to his view that information companies are different — meaning critical to freedom — and that does not seem to be the current sentiment. The internet, for the moment, stands poised at the prison gate.