Tim Wu's "Master Switch" has been a page-turner for me over the holiday weekend. Though it's non-fiction and very much in the spirit of nerdy tomes like "Wealth of Networks," or "The Future of the Internet," the thing this book has going for it more than those is its deeply researched history of the evolution of the phone, radio, movie, and cable TV industries.

The book's key message can be summed up with George Santayana's quote: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." For in each of the communications industries covered, events begin with the spark of the amateur hackers doing things just for the sheer joy of seeing them exist up until the point at which the capitalists come in, checkbooks blazing to create AT&T, NBC/RCA, Turner Broadcasting, etc. Real disruptive businesses are built on venture dynamics and out of the best of each, natural monopolies emerge—monopolies which are based on unique qualities of communications infrastructure— only to then be meddled with by the government who, concerned with the potential damaging effects of monopoly business (and totally clueless on how these industries are different), spend a lot of time thinking about how to break apart these businesses only to discover that they are, at best, legislating last year's technology and trying hard not to look foolish doing so, while the now incumbent businesses go along their merry way building franchises that are hard to compete with by any new entrants not leveraging a truly new and disruptive technology.

The last chunk of the book is devoted to exploring the question of whether the Internet is different than previous forms of media that have gone before it. And in the end Wu concludes that it is not— that despite having been designed from the ground up to be decentralizedand abstracted into layers that would encourage continued entrepreneurial energy, the Internet too is likely to follow the path of its ancestors and end up a medium dominated by a few large entities. Of course he covers the battle currently waging between Apple and Google, comparing Apple's controlling approach to the AT&T of old and likening Google's "open" approach to prior mavericks attacking the establishment.

This last part hangs together less well than the rest of the book, but in the era of the FCC debating net neutrality, I'd say it is still a great book worth reading for anyone who wonders where this whole thing might end up. In my own case, my first thought upon putting this throughly enjoyable and informative book down was "ok, let's hope we get that next disruptive communication technology real soon now..."