Tim Wu's The Master Switch centers around his idea of 'the cycle' in modern information industries. He spends the vast majority of the book providing clear evidence of how these industries, radio, telephone, television and film, have all gone through periods of both centralization and relative openness. However, one question remains unanswered. It is still unclear how the newest and most innovative communications technology, the internet, will be affected by the cycle.
The internet itself was constructed around the founding principles of openness and individual control. Every user is to be able to use the internet in the way that best serves their needs, accessing whatever content they so choose. Despite this built in notion of openness, it seems that the internet remains extremely vulnerable to companies hungry for control over the world's largest communications medium. Indeed, Wu claims that "...even a technology as radical and powerful as the internet seems able at most to moderate but not to abolish," the inexorable cycle (289).
In trying to determine what may become of the internet in the future, the experiences of Google are interesting to examine. Google owes much of its success to the fact that it was shaped in direct compliance with the idea of net neutrality. As Wu points out, "it is the structure of the Internet, much less than anything particular to the firm itself, that keeps Google standing" (282). It is developed from and its future depends upon an open network. The vast, open network has endless amounts of information that Google was able to make easily accessible to all users. However, because Google depends upon others so heavily, both for content and for the modes that allow it to reach people, it is extremely vulnerable to annihilation (282).
If the structure of the internet began to change, if we threw away the openness that the founders of the internet envisioned, Google, our most popular internet search engine, would be in serious trouble. The company has already had to begin to expand its offerings in order to protect itself and its ideals from being disrupted by those who do not necessarily value a fully open network.
As Apple Inc. has developed new flashy devices, essentially mobile computers that fit in your palm, it has also aligned itself with the television, movie, music and telephone industries to provide the content and services that it so chooses (292). The goal of Apple is clearly to achieve "unrelenting control over [its] products and how they're used" (278). Such massive partnerships, while they may provide excellent products and services, are not in keeping with the ideal of an entirely open network. The customer may still have an illusion of individual control but in actuality the content and services that they can access are severely limited by the nature of the deals made between companies.
These limitations of content and access are threatening, as noted, to Google's entire business model. In 2007, Google developed the Android as an alternate operating system for telephones in order to attempt to move the "mobile world into territory that is friendly to Google rather than to its enemies" (294). Android is distributed for free, as are the majority of Google's services, both as a necessity to ensure Google's future and to ingrain the ideal of open service back into the communication industry. But should Google really have to spend its time developing new technologies just to protect itself? Google is so successful because the company is built on one extremely useful service that it has been able to spend its time developing to its full potential (283). It can be argued that if the company has to continue to develop new technologies just to stay afloat, rather than developing and releasing them on its own terms, then quality may suffer as its attention is forced to shift from its main purpose: internet search. No matter what, if other companies continue to build partnerships, which Google has rarely done, then Google will be at a supreme disadvantage in the world of internet communications.
At this point, the internet could still go either way. It is clear by the likes of Apple Inc. that a closed network is a definite possibility. For now, and hopefully for the indefinite future, the internet remains a largely open network full of all the varieties of content one could imagine. But, as Wu states, "however adapted to new forms and contexts" there is still a "human ambition to build and overthrow empires" (299). It is unlikely that such hunger for control will cease to exist anytime soon meaning that the urge to control the internet will continue to be an enticing one. And as we continue to increase our dependence on the internet as a mode of communication, information, entertainment and more, that urge will only get stronger. If any company were ever able to exercise entire control over the internet they would hold an unprecedented amount of power in their hands, a frightening prospect to say the least.
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