It was a simpler time on the internet in 2010, but early battles for corporate control were well underway. Net neutrality battles between ISPs and consumers/tech companies were raging, as were the anti-circumvention copyfights. But beyond those narrow battles, there was a broader war.
Jonathon Zittrain warned of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and Tim Wu warned of the inevitable war for The Master Switch. I thought it might be a waste of time to read The Master Switch in 2026, after it languished in my “to read” pile for a decade and a half, but I was impressed reading it this winter. It provided an excellent history of 20th century communications technology that helps me to better understand today’s battle for the internet. According to Tim Wu, the history of communications technology has been a cycle (“the Cycle”) with a brief period of an open system, then an empire built on control, until eventually the empire falls to a new system — and then the Cycle repeats. This happened with the telephone, long distance calling, AM radio, FM radio, broadcast television, and cable. Wu’s question in 2010 was: Will it be any different with the internet?
We hoped so. The internet is different – it’s a universal network. But Wu’s account of early optimism about the telephone, AM radio, broadcast TV, and cable during brief periods of openness and free speech serve as a warning as each of those technologies was quickly captured by a small handful of companies (if not a single monopoly) for decades, often with the assistance of government (sometimes unwittingly but often very wittingly). Before reading The Master Switch, I’d always believed there was something inherent to 20th century communications technology that led to centralized control by a few companies, but I was surprised to learn that each of these technologies actually started out much more open and decentralized. Centralization was inevitable, but for political, economic, and cultural reasons — not because of the technology.
Writing in 2010 during the battle for net neutrality, it seemed that Tim Wu’s concern was telecommunications companies taking control of the internet. That hasn’t happened, but the Cycle has repeated with technology companies like Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google).
Wu’s thesis is that the story of creative destruction — that new, disruptive innovations will displace old monopolies — is actually much more complicated. Monopolists don’t go without a fight. There’s regulatory capture (in which government regulations of dominant companies actually serve to shore up their dominance), there are just plain old dirty tricks (the sabotage from AT&T!), but most insightful is what Wu calls the Kronos Effect.
In antiquity, Kronos, the second ruler of the universe according to Greek mythology, had a problem. The Delphic oracle having warned him that one of his children would dethrone him, he was more than troubled to hear his wife was pregnant. He waited for her to give birth, then took the child and ate it. His wife got pregnant again and again, so he had to eat his own more than once.
And so derives the Kronos Effect, the efforts undertaken by a dominant company to consume its potential successors in their infancy. Understanding this effect is critical to understanding the Cycle, and for that matter, the history of information technology. It may sometimes seem that invention and technological advance are a natural, orderly process, but this is an illusion. Whatever technological reality we live with is the result of tooth-and-claw industrial combat.
While Wu in 2010 had his eye on telecommunications companies and international conglomerates, it’s hard to think of a better description for the way in which the dominant internet companies have survived — by consuming their competitors in their infancy. Facebook disrupted MySpace, but then bought Instagram and WhatsApp and many other companies. Google disrupted Yahoo!, but then bought YouTube and most Google products came from acquisitions (Maps, Docs, and many more). Amazon is notorious for business practices that choke out competitors. The internet giants have become very good at consuming their competitors during infancy over the past 20 years.
Internet companies have fended off telcos and Hollywood, but in this round of the Cycle, they’ve become the centralized powers. The web we once loved is largely forgotten about as the internet has reduced computing to a few companies: it’s Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Apple iOS or Google Android, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp and Twitter/X. Name the last scrappy startup that’s offered a service you’ve heard of? The big guys eat them. The only other examples I can think of are “AI” companies that threaten dominance and new centralized control almost right out of the gate. And the more the internet has centralized, the more its been enshittified.
It’s a bleak picture. Tim Wu’s history of 20th century battles sheds a lot of light on the present day.
For example, I knew a tiny bit about AT&T and Bell Labs and the famous Carterphone decision, but I had no idea how many technologies Bell Labs had invented and suppressed — like magnetic tape and the answering machine which were invented in the 1930s!
Let’s return to Hickman’s magnetic tape and the answering machine. What’s interesting is that Hickman’s invention in the 1930s would not be “discovered” until the 1990s. For soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives.
“The impressive technical successes of Bell Labs’ scientists and engineers,” writes Clark, “were hidden by the upper management of both Bells Lab and AT&T.” AT&T “refused to develop magnetic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its development and use by others.” Eventually magnetic tape would come to America via imports of foreign technology, mainly German.
But why would company management bury such an important and commercially valuable discovery? What were they afraid of? The answer, rather surreal, is evident in the corporate memoranda, also unearthed by Clark, imposing the research ban. AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.
More precisely, in Bell’s imagination, the very knowledge that it was possible to record a conversation would “greatly restrict the use of the telephone,” with catastrophic consequences for its business. Businessmen, for instance, the theory supposed, might fear the potential use of a recorded conversation to undo a written contract. Tape recorders would also inhibit discussing obscene or ethically dubious matters. In sum, the very possibility of magnetic recording, it was feared, would “change the whole nature of telephone conversations” and “render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed.”
And so we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid. True, once magnetic recording arrived in America, there were a few, from Nixon to Lewinsky, whose sordid secrets would be exposed by it. But, amazingly enough, we all still use telephones. Such are the liabilities of being subject to the whim of even the most high-minded corporation: even the fantasy that the fate of the company could be at stake can have significant consequences. It was safer to shut down a thrilling line of research than risk the Bell system.
This is the essential weakness of a centralized approach to innovation: the notion that it can be a planned and systematic process, best directed by a kind of central intelligence; that is is simply a matter of assembling all the best minds and putting them to work in unison. Were it so, the future could be planned and executed in a scientific manner.
Yes, Bell Labs was great. 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. In the language of innovation theory, the output of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustaining inventions; disruptive technologies, those that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business model, were simply out of the question.
The recording machine is only one example of a technology that AT&T, out of such fears, would for years suppress or fail to market: fiber optics, mobile telephones, digital subscriber lines (DSL), facsimile machines, speakerphones—the list goes on and on. These technologies, ranging from novel to revolutionary, were simple too daring for Bell’s comfort. Without a reliable sense of how they might affect the Bell system, AT&T and its heirs would deploy each with painfully slow caution, if at all.
Perhaps the response seems less neurotic if we consider how deep-seated can be the apprehension of the Kronos effect. Not for nothing would the Bell system prove itself among the best defended and most secure monopolies in corporate history. Whatever the opportunity inherent in new technology, there was always also a threat, one that prudence demanded be devoured at birth. Bell’s own genesis had proved that bit of wisdom. In 1876, Alexander Bell had patented the machine that eventually dethroned and replaced what was then the nation’s greatest corporation, Western Union. What charm of the new can possibly rival the instinct for self-preservation?
This is why Wu says that unseating monopolists is less of question of market dynamics than politics. The Cycle between decentralized freedom and centralized control is determined not by technology alone, but by wide-scale tooth-and-claw industrial combat, and monopolies are more often aided by government intervention than prevented. (AT&T was being propped up by all sorts of government support!)
Industry structure determines freedom of expression in the medium. I had no idea that at the start of radio or television, anyone could broadcast in a peer-to-peer type manner. Once everyone needed a licence from the government to broadcast radio or television, and the government only wanted a few broadcasters in the market, control went into the hands of the government and a few companies, and a technology that actually started out decentralized became centralized.
Communications technology is just some specialized field affecting a particular corner of industry. Freedom of speech depends on the ability to communicate — and expression is mediated by communications technology. The shape of the industry becomes the shape of freedom of expression, and that has not only technological but economic, political, cultural, artistic, social, and even religious implications. Communications technology affects how we speak and what we can say to each other.
In 2010, Tim Wu’s concern for the future of the internet was large conglomerates as the battles of that era were between old and new media companies. There was a legitimate question at the time: Is Google a different kind of firm? They sure seemed like it in the 2000s, but Google has long since dropped their “don’t be evil” motto. In 2010, Wu holds up Google Android as a radically new approach to raise the question of whether Google was a fundamentally different kind of firm that might prevent the Cycle from repeating, but by 2018 it was clear that Google had just developed an innovative and novel form of bait and switch, and was exerting immense control over the Android Open Source Project (that continues to worsen).
Looking back on the threats to the open internet in 2010, the technology companies largely fended off the telcos and old media conglomerates. But as Cory Doctorow often says, every pirate wants to be an admiral. The tech companies just found ways to exert their own centralized control over the internet. It’s not primarily from the conglomerate supermonopoly that Wu warns about — though the acquisition and control of multiple marketplaces is real (see Netflix and Amazon) — but through harnessing the power of the internet’s network effects for monopoly, the internet that people use every day is large controlled by just a few, huge companies.
The dominant technology companies consume their competitors in their infancy, but they also make it really hard to leave. You can leave Facebook or Twitter/X for Mastodon or Bluesky, but you’re leaving a centralized, proprietary social media space for a balkanized one. You’re leaving your social networks behind. Sure, you and try to opt out of Google’s system, but to whom will you go? And how will you interface with the rest of the world? Microsoft’s monopoly came from 20th century practices of control and nasty competition, but Alphabet and Meta have updated those practices for the 21st century to find even more effective ways to get centralized control. Google’s vertical integration isn’t necessarily by controlling your hardware, ISP, and the online service, but by thorough vertical integration of the information ecosystem.
What does it matter who makes your hardware or who your mobile carrier is if you’re using Chrome, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Pay, YouTube, Google Search, Gemini, Google Assistant, an Android mobile, Android Auto in your car, an Android Watch, a Google TV, Google Home, Google Drive instead of your own computer for all your files, Google Analytics spying on everyone who visits your website, and Google Maps for everywhere you go. And what’s the alternative? An Apple equivalent stack? Microsoft or Amazon? You have three or four vertically integration Big Tech options to chose from.
The internet is different, but in both a positive and negative way. It is the universal network, but the efficiencies that arise from centralized control are exponential.
The Cycle isn’t over. It’s still industrial warfare for the technology we rely on to communicate, but the weapons technology has advanced. Bell and Western Union were fighting with rifles and bayonets, AT&T was mowing down competitors with machine guns, but Google and Amazon are fighting with drones and an iron dome. It’s the same old battle, but with much more sophisticated weapons.
Wu’s final chapter calls for a Separations Principle as a response to the danger of private power and supermonopolies — a separation between major functions in the information economy. I think the fundamental challenge with separating markets today is that the definition of the market changes too quickly with advances in technology. What business is OpenAI even in and who are the competitors? That said, I’m sold on antitrust as a key part of the solution. Wu says, “the government’s only proper role is as a check on private power, never as an aid to it.” I think we also desperately need technological means to resist centralization, like Masnick’s call for protocols over platforms (like ActivityPub or AT Protocol) and even more local/personal control of LLMs and agents in his 2026 vision for a decentralized internet, or Cory Doctorow’s call for adversarial interoperability. And we need people willing to rebuild the internet we once loved.
Because the internet isn’t the end of the Cycle. The Master Switch is still relevant in 2026 because the Cycle is more alive today than ever before.
Tim Wu quotes Luo Guanzhong to open the final chapter of The Master Switch:
An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. Thus it has ever been, and thus it will always be.
