Tim Wu

A variant on Doctorow’s Enshittification—another book about how platforms use their position between buyers and sellers to extract the surplus from both, immiserating us in the absence of strong antitrust laws. People really did make millions from small businesses on Amazon (etc.) and now that’s basically impossible. Influencers can succeed, but, Wu notes, “the influencer was plainly a laboring class, as opposed to one with ownership over any productive asset. … This has made show more burnout and mental health problems the black lung of the influencer industry.” This process is most advanced online, but Wu points to the private equity rollup of medical practices to show that doctors, too, “are transitioning from being a professional guild with control of their own human capital back to being a laboring class, members of the proletariat.” So too with investors buying single-family homes to turn them into rentals. He concludes: “we are conducting a reckless economic experiment that history suggests has rarely gone well. Most dangerous of all, it has a track record of creating conditions conducive to the rise of an authoritarian strongman.”

Small sources of real economic power are the key to improvement. Neoliberal aims is insufficient, given that “[e]conomic power consists of the ability to resist redistribution. That’s why a policy focused on only growing the pie was also likely, on a systemic basis, to have prevented it from being cut in the first place.” Just as city squares can be revitalized, so can other common infrastructure that helps create wider prosperity. show less

An enjoyable read, mostly examples and light on theory. The general theme of the book is the history of attention merchants, industries that grab the attention of the average passerbyer and then sell that attention to someone else, typically but not always an advertiser (there are a few chapters devoted to the birth of modern day propaganda in World War I and then its use by the Nazis). Wu discusses two main themes that emerge from the history. One is that there is a trend in attention show more merchants intruding into previously private spheres of life to sell slices of that attention (examples include the TV entering the household and a pretty horrifying modern day example where students watch ads in return for cash for the school). The other trend is the downward trend in quality of content. As advertisers try to grab the attention of the consumer, there's a race to the bottom as the content becomes more outrageous and attention grabbing (the early ad driven newspapers resorted to straight up fiction, making up stories of discovering bat-moonmen to drive circulation numbers) competing against each other. Once the low point is reached, there is an incentive for people to try to expose the industry (someone writes a report or a book expose typically). At that point, the consumers revolt, unhappy with the trade off of their attention for the content (Wu portrays the 1960s as a sort of meta-revolt of this sort against established attention merchants) and a new balance is reached through technological advances like the remote or ad-blocker or legal mechanisms such as the banning of large posters in Paris, or enactment of regulation through the FDA (in response to patent medicine) or efforts to police TV through the FCC. Wu traces the history of attention merchants from the earliest ad driven newspaper to the TV, through celebrity culture (Wu presents a few interesting theories on the allure of celebrities including as a replacement for pagan worship or a faux familiarity, there's an entire chapter devoted to Oprah, how she started like other shows but through seemingly honest and vulnerable interest stories and promotion of products she loves grow to be a brand onto herself), to the first spam email, first internet viral email (Wu also has an interesting theory on email, that it essentially activates our reward systems to check and find an email there, and the volatility/unpredictable nature of emails makes this addictive the same way roulette gambling is) and clickbait.

Almost as useful as the general theory and meticulous research into the history of each industry are the entertaining anecdotes. The value of these in my opinion are not just their value as stories for cocktail parties (which is great, and in fact the reason I read at all), but also a view of history as contingent on personalities and events. Wu shows that at least in the history of attention merchants nothing is really inevitable (even the magazine format, of ads in between blocks of content, was invented and implemented). Wu discusses the origin of the term snake oil salesman (he was in fact, an actual person who sold it as a cure during the patent medicine era) and even the phrase "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" (that one comes from a listerine ad). Wu alleges that the signature "Seig Heil" came from a man who was inspired by the harvard fight song (though there was no citation for this allegation, a bit concerning, in fact the entire book seems light on citation). I personally found the section on the internet a bit of a disappointment considering Wu's expertise in the area (generally the story told is very mainstream, discussing the harms of a narcissistic tendency in instagram for example). However, even then there were a few insights that I thought were interesting. For example, that Zuckerberg had studied human psychology (saying it was never a waste of time to learn about people) and that facebook reified existing social connections and was driven by its exclusivity. Wu's point about google's rise (off of ad-words) and the inevitable deal with the devil through an ad model and its challenges in its battles against close systems like apple are enlightening. I also found Wu's description of the early internet as interesting, particularly because AOL seemed to succeed where prodigy (an internet service backed by many of the heavy weights in media) failed, despite prodigy generally being ahead of its time in terms of ideas (content creation, sports reporting etc). This reinforces the idea that good ideas are a dime a dozen and rarely leads to success, but it's all in the execution. I liked the book a lot more when I started, but the length is a bit unnecessary and the lack of citations raises questions about the neat narrative presented (details ruin a great story). Still a great read and essential to our age. show less

This book is divided into two parts: the first 300 pages, which is a high-level history of how a common cycle of innovation and monopolization has manifested itself in various communication/information industries like radio, movies, television, telephone, cable TV, and the internet. Then there's the last chapter, which is Wu's What Is To Be Done? moment where he suggests a possible regulatory regime that will protect the public interest in these network technologies while still allowing for show more sufficient innovation and invention.

The history section is about as good as you could expect with such a broad range of industries to cover, with plenty of interesting details about the inventors, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who have battled over control of what we now regard as public infrastructure nearly as essential as roads or sewage. He identifies what he calls the Cycle, common to all network technologies since the telegraph, whereby a small-time inventor comes up with a new gadget that allows people to consume or distribute information (it could be multiple inventors - simultaneous inventions are surprisingly frequent, and the difference in success and fame between an Alexander Bell and an Elisha Grey is often as much a matter of luck or corporate backing as technological merits), threatens an established interest with a stake in an old communications paradigm, and makes the steady climb from plucky underdog to overbearing behemoth until the next game-changing inventor comes from nowhere to challenge the incumbent and start the whole process over again.

Since a large part of my professional career has involved AT&T in one way or another I was anxious to read the story of one of the largest and most entrenched monopolies of all time. Wu delivered an abbreviated but still fascinating account of how what used to be just another company came to be The Phone Company, its quest for "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" on the one hand underwriting the tremendous research of Bell Labs and on the other consolidating more power over people's ability to communicate with each other than any company in history. He also gave great overviews of the stories of companies in the other industries; I particularly enjoyed the sections on the vicious struggles in the movie industry, and though he didn't make the parallels to the modern video game industry that I've discussed with friends in the business it's a great exposition of the nature of cartels and how they can impose censorship as bad or worse as that of a government. All told, the historical part of the book is great, and very convincing in its suggestions that all these related technologies are in some sense destined to undergo Schumpeterian cycles of innovation, disruption, consolidation, and stagnation as new business models supplant old ones.

The controversial part, though, is the final chapter with Wu's attempts to outline how we can protect ourselves from monopolies while still enjoying the fruits of companies which would very much like to be monopolies someday. Designing a good regulatory regime is a classic attempt to square the circle, and Wu himself comes up with many examples in the first part of the book how various agencies like the FCC have been co-opted to serve the interests of the businesses they were supposed to be restraining. Since this problem is of course hardly unique to the telecom industry, it's not really surprising that he ends up proposing a tripartite Separations Principle that's more akin to inflexible rule-based proposals (e.g. a discarded plan in drafts of the Dodd-Frank Act to simply place hard caps on the size of large banks) than discretionary agency-based proposals (e.g. an actual provision in the Dodd-Frank Act to create a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police bank actions).

The first part is temporal separation, which means to restrain established players in an industry from devouring infant entrants, as in the Justice Department's battle to prevent Microsoft from crushing Netscape by using the incumbent advantages of Internet Explorer. The second is functional separation, and he gives the example of preventing movie studios from directly owning the theaters that show their films. The third is regulatory separation, which he defines as removing the potential for regulatory capture by giving the government the power only to check private actors, never to aid them. It should go without saying that in the brief form in the book, this Principle seems at a glance to be hopelessly vague and unworkable; let's use Google as an example. What kind of neutral standard would allow for Google to integrate its Android operating system and Chrome browser with its Google TV platform yet forbid AT&T to give affiliated content higher bandwidth priority on its uVerse internet service (i.e. the opposite of net neutrality)? Similarly, a rule to restrict the ability of Disney to morph into the vast entertainment conglomerate it is today would surely also hamper Google's ability to purchase products like Maps or YouTube. And what kind of "check, not aid" actions, if any, should the government take in situations like Google's copyright struggles with publishers over its attempts to broaden its Google Books database?

I'm skeptical that Wu's admirably clear principles could be simply turned into a working and beneficial regulatory scheme. This isn't really his fault given the size of the book compared to the daunting complexity of modern corporations and the fluid nature of boundaries in network technologies, but it's disappointing that such a perceptive critic of monopoly power proposed such underwhelming solutions. He should write a longer book on that subject; I would eagerly read it. show less

I don't think this book aged well. The premise is that the Internet had (has?) the ability to break the Cycle of all technologies going from open (lots of competition) to closed (monopoly or very consolidated industry). Maybe people were just more naive in 2010 (when this book was published). I guess Facebook didn't buy Instagram until 2012, but Google had already purchased YouTube. So it's not like the big fish weren't already eating up their possible competition. I suppose we didn't know show more the extent to which Google was buying their default search engine status, but if that isn't a monopoly move, I don't know what is.

Also the author seems to think that Net Neutrality is like, some kind of universal law of nature and not something that lawmakers will happily get rid of, and that the large players like Google and Facebook are happy to sacrifice, because they're the only ones big enough to buy favored status. It's now 2024, and literally Peter Thiel chose who will be the next VP of this country, and Net Neutrality will likely be on the chopping block once the dust settles after the inauguration. I don't get to pick my ISP because they're allowed to be a monopoly, so why the heck wouldn't they want to charge me more for doing the things I'm already doing if lawmakers allow them to? Net Neutrality isn't gravity.

At one point, the author seems to imply that only telecommunications companies are "important" enough to be able to influence governments, even making a joke about how orange juice companies wouldn't over throw governments. Bro, have you heard of United Fruit? Central America would like some words.

I didn't like that the book totally overlooks cellular service at all. Like it brings up all this technology but not cell. It also brushes over ISPs. Honestly, I was more interested in the tech than the economics focus of the book (which aged like milk), so I was kind of disappointed that it wasn't really exhaustive.

The author really hyperbolizes (if not outright makes up) an explosion at the broadcast of the "Fight of the Century" to which I can find no source. The closest I could find is that a tube blew in the fourth round, but it was replaced. If an author is going to lie or hyperbolize about something like that, I find it hard to believe anything else they write. I also thought it would have been a much more interesting discussion about how AT&T refused to connect the phone line to the transmitter, which they needed to make the broadcast (source: https://earlyradiohistory.us/WJY.htm). This seems to be actually true and ALSO supports the author's thesis of how the established giants don't like new technology which could possibly be disruptive. But it was not included in the book.

Finally, I guess 2011 was a long time ago, because the exclusive use of he/him pronouns made this book unbearable. It was so jarring and made me think the book was even older than it is. Yuck. show less