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

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.

But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a serious genetic flaw: it could not originate technologies that might, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system.

It would mean that those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access must be kept apart from one another.

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.

the network is not some renewable natural resource but a man-made structure, one that exists only owing to decades of infrastructure building at great cost to great companies,

At the most basic level, Schumpeter believed that innovation and economic growth are one and the same. Countries that innovated would grow wealthier; those that did not would stagnate.

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

innovation platform.

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