Tim Wu

"From Tim Wu, author of award-winning The Master Switch, and who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--a revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting," and its transformative effect on our society and our selves"--

The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

The Attention Merchants

The Internet Age: on the face of it, an era of unprecedented freedom in both communication and culture. Yet in the past, each major new medium, from telephone to satellite television, has crested on a wave of similar idealistic optimism, before succumbing to the inevitable undertow of industrial consolidation. Every once free and open technology has, in time, become centralized and closed; as corporate power has taken control of the 'master switch.' Today a similar struggle looms over the Internet, and as it increasingly supersedes all other media the stakes have never been higher. Part industrial expos, part examination of freedom of expression, The Master Switch reveals a crucial drama - full of indelible characters - as it has played out over decades in the shadows of global communication.

The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

The Master Switch

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality" and who has made significant contributions to our understanding of antitrust policy and wireless communications, comes a call for tighter antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate bigness.

Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

The Curse of Bigness

Jack Goldsmith

In this provocative new book, the authors tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and of the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate users forever from government, borders, and even their physical selves.

Illusions of a Borderless World

Who Controls the Internet?

From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch and who coined the phrase "net neutrality"--A revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting," and its transformative effect on our society and our selves. Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to TV's golden age to our present age of radically individualized choices, the business model of "attention merchants" has always been the same. He describes the revolts that have risen against these relentless attempts to influence our consumption, from the remote control to FDA regulations to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants grow ever-new heads, and their means of harvesting our attention have given rise to the defining industries of our time, changing our nature-cognitive, social, and otherwise-in ways unimaginable even a generation ago. From the Hardcover edition.

Claudio Carina

Traçando uma história dos meios de comunicação, Tim Wu procura mostrar como essa indústria percorre sempre um ciclo, etapas de abertura e de fechamento, esta última representada pela formação de grandes monopólios da informação. Esta obra pretende indagar se a internet seguirá essa mesma tendência. Para esquentar o debate, o autor busca rechear a discussão com histórias sobre traições, processos na justiça, golpes de executivos de vários setores. E analisar o mercado moderno da internet. Para o autor, por exemplo, iPhone, iPod e iPad são na verdade sistemas voltados para o consumo e não para a produção de conteúdo, resultantes de um acordo entre Steve Jobs, Hollywood, a imprensa de Nova York e a AT&T. A obra tem o intuito de questionar ainda se a parcela livre da rede, como os sites colaborativos, conseguirá sobreviver sem formar monopólios.

Impérios da comunicação

Tim Wu, On Copyright's Authorship Policy

Master Switch

How Corporate Giants Came to Rule the World

Jack L. Goldsmith

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net--Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events, the original vision was uprooted, as governments time and time again asserted their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community. "A timely look at the ways that governments make themselves felt in cyberspace. Goldsmith and Wu cover a range of controversies, from domain-name disputes to online poker and porn to political censorship. Their judgments are well worth attending." --David Robinson,Wall Street Journal "In the 1990s the Internet was greeted as the New New Thing: It would erase national borders, give rise to communal societies that invented their own rules, undermine the power of governments. In this splendidly argued book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu explain why these early assumptions were mostly wrong. By turns provocative and colorful...an essential read." --Sebastian Mallaby, Editorial Writer and Columnist,The Washington Post

Aufstieg und Niedergang der Medienimperien

Der Master Switch

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Tim Wu nimmt uns in diesem Buch mit auf eine informative Reise durch das Reich der Kommunikationstechnologien beginnend bei Telefon über Radio, Fernsehen bis hin zum Internet. Dabei analysiert er gründlich die Entwicklung der Kommunikationsmöglichkeiten und deren Auswirkungen in Bezug auf die Möglichkeiten der offenen Kommunikation sowie deren Kontrolle. Er zeigt dabei unter anderem immer wiederkehrende Zyklen auf, wie neue Technologien häufig aus kleinen Unternehmen entstanden sind, später von wenigen großen dominiert wurden, um wiederum neue innovative Unternehmen entstehen zu lassen. Tim Wu zeigt die Hintergründe solcher Entwicklungen auf, die zu dem heutigen Stand geführt haben.

Tim Wu

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