Book of the week: The Master Switch by Tim Wu

(Knopf, $27.95)

Columbia professor Tim Wu sees many parallels between early radio and today’s Internet, said Jeremy Philips in The Wall Street Journal. In the 1920s, he reminds us, radio equipment was cheap enough that “almost anyone” could become a broadcaster. But big players quickly figured out that raising the barriers to entry would bolster their profits, so they pushed for regulation. The result: Radio’s open field soon was transformed into an oligopoly. Wu is “one of telecom’s great writers,” said Scott Woolley in CNNmoney.com, so it’s no surprise that his new book is filled with entertaining tales of how phone service, the movie industry, and cable TV followed a similar pattern. But Wu uses his reading of history to advocate for new laws to separate the Internet’s infrastructure providers from its content suppliers. The problem: The cycle he discerns in history “has been broken by digital technology.” Communications this century “will be different.”

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