Read This: The Master Switch

The Master Switch is an amazing, interesting book about "The Cycle." The Cycle is the pattern of the rise and fall of information empires formed around new inovation in technology.
Remember Western Union? The monopolistic telegraph company?
No? Neither do most people. That's because it was toppled by the innovation of Bell's telephone. (Or was the telephone Bell's? That's also covered in the book.)

It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American 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 American 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 Internet’s future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out
I'm about 50 pages into the book and am already addicted to it. It's incredibly interesting to learn about the beginnings, rises, and falls of all these smilingly unbeatable companies.

You can buy The Master Switch in hardcover or paperback below.