总开关：信息帝国的兴衰
关于本书：
In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.
As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.
Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.
Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, 总开关 这部戏剧在我们国家生活的阴影中上演了几十年，现在以对我们未来的可怕影响达到高潮。
关于作者：
Tim Wu 是哥伦比亚法学院的教授，最著名的是他对网络中立的发展。
他是《注意力商人》、《总开关》和《谁控制互联网？
他之前曾在巴拉克奥巴马总统的白宫工作，是硅谷的资深人士。他是美国最高法院的法律助理。他毕业于麦吉尔大学（理学士）和哈佛法学院。
Wu has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, T Magazine, Washington Post, Forbes, Slate magazine, and others, and once worked at Hoo’s Dumplings.
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