The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Vintage)

the most rapid or efficient innovation typically results when the widest range of variations are proposed and the invisible hand of competition, as proxy of the future, picks among them.

innovation platform.

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.

At the same time, the Separations Principle stipulates one other necessity: that the government also keep its distance and not intervene in the market to favor any technology, network monopoly, or integration of the major functions of an information industry.

This time is different: with everything on one network, the potential power to control is so much greater.

It was beginning to seem that the same might be true of information systems.

But the state’s role, while significant, cannot compare to the power of industry to censor expression or squelch invention.

“End-to-End Arguments in System Design,” they argued for the enormous potential inherent in decentralizing decisional authority—giving it to the network users (the “ends”).15 The network itself (the “middle”) should, they insisted, be as nonspecialized as possible, so as to serve the “ends” in any ways they could imagine.*

It would mean that those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the tools or venues of access must be kept apart from one another.