The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Vintage)

But the state’s role, while significant, cannot compare to the power of industry to censor expression or squelch invention.

As it happened, the transformation in Hollywood content was so abrupt as to be shocking, and it demonstrates a substantial vulnerability of highly centralized systems: while designed for stability’s sake, they are in fact susceptible to extremely drastic disruption.

At the same time, the Separations Principle stipulates one other necessity: that the government also keep its distance and not intervene in the market to favor any technology, network monopoly, or integration of the major functions of an information industry.

the most rapid or efficient innovation typically results when the widest range of variations are proposed and the invisible hand of competition, as proxy of the future, picks among them.

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

For the purposes of our narrative, the conclusion is clear: an open medium has much to recommend it, but not the power to unify the country.

This time is different: with everything on one network, the potential power to control is so much greater.

“End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” they argued for the enormous potential inherent in decentralizing decisional authority—giving it to the network users (the “ends”).15 The network itself (the “middle”) should, they insisted, be as nonspecialized as possible, so as to serve the “ends” in any ways they could imagine.*

It was beginning to seem that the same might be true of information systems.