The Wu Master

The internet is under threat. At risk is what's known as "net neutrality", or the principle of free access for each user to every online site, regardless of content. That's the view of the man who coined the above term, Tim Wu, whose new book, The Master Switch, was published yesterday. It argues the internet now runs the risk of not just political censorship – as seen in Libya and Egypt, and in the American reaction to WikiLeaks – but that of commercial censorship, too. Monopolies such as Google and Apple may soon decide to choose which parts of the internet to give us – or switch off – and in some cases have already started to do so.

"We are in a critical period for the internet," Tim Wu, the book's author, says. "What the internet is, is in flux." Wu looks, a colleague suggests, like a cleverer version of Keanu Reeves. In reality, he is a senior adviser to the Obama administration on, fittingly, the competition issues that concern internet and mobile industries. A position which, ironically, makes him a distant colleague of the officials waging war against WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning. An academic lawyer by trade – he has taught at Chicago, Columbia and Stanford – Wu has also long been a respected commentator on internet issues, and writes regularly for Slate magazine. The first to coin the term "net neutrality", Wu is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as social media experts Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis, and sceptics Evgeny Morozov, Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier. But unlike these five, whose work is mainly concerned with a discussion about the (de)merits of online activity, Wu's book perhaps places him in a critically different category. The Master Switch is less concerned with the rights and wrongs of the internet today, and more concerned with its long-term future.

"The internet is about 15 years into its cycle as an open medium," says Wu, "and at that moment in their cycle, most open media tend to turn to closed media." What Wu means is that the internet might be about to go the same way as the information services of the 20th century: the telephone, radio, cinema and television. "Internet is the descendant of these industries," Wu says, "a 15-year-old teenager." And if we want to know what kind of adult this teenager will become, "the clearest way is to look at its parents, and look what happened to them when they reached their 20s".

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