Part industrial expose, part examination of freedom of expression, The Master Switch reveals the decades of power play in the shadows of global communication and how it relates to the Internet today. It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the information industry - from the telephone to radio to film - once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web - the entire flow of information - come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of 'the master switch'? Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today's great information powers - Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT+T - Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royale for the Internet's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.