by Tom Wheeler
17. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 29.
18. Hubbard had met Vail while serving on President Hayes’s commission on mail transportation: Casson, History of the Telephone, p. 23.
19. James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), p. 189, with citation.
20. Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century, p. 233.
21. Wu, Master Switch, p. 26.
22. Ibid., p. 27.
23. Hubbard had also hired lawyers to file suit attacking Western Union’s patent claims.
24. Wu, Master Switch, p. 31.
25. Casson, History of the Telephone, p. 30.
26. Ibid., p. 30. The Bell patent wars continued until in 1888, in a 4-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Alexander Graham Bell had indeed invented the telephone.
27. Ibid., p. 61.
28. Ibid., p. 62.
29. Wu, Master Switch, p. 46, citing Horace Coon, American Tel & Tel: The Story of a Great Monopoly (1939; Books for Libraries Press, 1971), pp. 66–67.
30. The corporate name was changed to AT&T in 1885 by then president William Forbes.
31. Coon, American Tel & Tel, p. 102
32. Ibid., p. 103.
33. John, Network Nation, p. 340.
34. Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 19.
35. Ibid., p. 127.
36. Wu, Master Switch, pp. 104–06.
37. Tariff FCC No. 132, filed April 16, 1957.
38. The total control over the network exercised by the Bell System sometimes bordered on the humorous. The idea that “foreign attachments” could endanger the network seems far-fetched in this age when a trip to the drugstore brings back a telephone that easily attaches to the network with no deleterious effects. In the ultimate illustration of thwarting consumers in the name of “one policy, one system, one universal service,” a plastic phonebook cover containing local advertising was deemed a “foreign attachment” and banned because it covered (and competed with) the advertising in the Bell-owned Yellow Pages, whose revenues, it was argued, helped to reduce the cost of phone service.
39. Even then, however, the federal government allowed AT&T to design complex and expensive tests that had to be passed before a modem was allowed to connect. One result of this was to force the introduction of acoustically coupled (as opposed to electronically coupled) modems, those silly-looking boxes with rubber ears into which fit a telephone receiver.
40. Paul Baran, “On Distributed Communications” (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 1964).
41. Paul Baran explained, “In the analog days both ends of the connection needed to work in tandem, and the probability of many things working in tandem without failing was so low that you had to make every part nearly perfect. But if you don’t care about reliability any more [because the packets simply reroute themselves around the fault], then the cost of the components goes way down.” Quoted in Stewart Brand, “Founding Father,” Wired, March 1, 2001.
42. Ibid.
43. Paul Baran, conversation and January 29, 2011, email with the author regarding Baran’s attempts to explain packet-switching concepts to executives and engineers whose only experience had been with circuit-switched networks.
44. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 64.
45. The first ARPANET nodes were at Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UCSB, and the University of Utah.
46. In 1965 Donald Davies, the Englishman who coined the term “packet switching,” proposed something similar to ARPANET at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom. It never was funded, but many of his ideas found their way into ARPANET.
47. The key to the early ARPANET was the installation at each site of a new computer, an interface message processor (IMP) that would control the network connection (send and receive data, check for errors, route the data, and so on). A common protocol was established for how the IMPs would communicate with their host computers. See Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, p. 75.
48. Carolyn Duffy Marsan, “The Evolution of the Internet,” NetworkWorld, February 9, 2009.
49. While ARPANET was only for noncommercial uses, the edges of that rule began to blur as companies such as Hewlett-Packard connected their network, albeit for the purpose of furthering the research HP was conducting. By the time ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990 the internet working of TCP/IP knew no commercial/noncommercial bounds.
50. Others involved included Bob Braden, Jon Poster, and Steve Crocker.
51. TCP/IP has an abstract construct that represents different activities as layers in the “network stack.” At the bottom layer is the physical medium (for example, optical fiber) over which the message travels. One step up is the link layer, which describes how the message will be sent over the physical layer (for example, the protocol for Wi-Fi). Next up the stack is the internet layer, described above. At the top of the stack is the application layer containing the actual message.
52. Of course, there is also the incremental cost of building added capacity. That, too, is decreasing as a result of digitization. AT&T, for instance, reported that “in 2015/16 we’re going to deploy about 250% of the capacity that we did in 2013/14, and we’re going to do it for 75% of the cost.” “AT&T’s (T) Management Presents at Wells Fargo 2016 Convergence & Connectivity Symposium (Transcript),” SeekingAlpha.com, June 21, 2016.
53. Radio was originally envisioned as an application of the telephone network, but point-to-multipoint broadcasting proved much more efficient than a circuit occupying point-to-point wired connection. When television signals first began to be distributed by coaxial cable (a technology available to the telephone company), it was opposed by phone companies, many of which denied the cable access to their telephone poles.
54. Hal Varian, quoted in Steven Levy, How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 117.
Chapter 7
1. International Telecommunications Union (ITU), “ITU Releases Annual Global ICT Data and ICT Development Index Country Rankings,” November 30, 2015 (http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/57.aspx#.VqUXuTFdGj2).
2. Ibid.
3. Zachery Davies Boren, “There Are Officially More Mobile Devices Than People in the World,” The Independent, October 7, 2014. This does not mean that every person has a mobile phone. However, it is a measure of the scope and scale of wireless penetration.
4. While texting and some rudimentary data services were offered on some devices in 2002, it was still principally a mobile phone, and other applications were ancillary.
5. Irwinb Lebow, Information Highways& Byways (New York: IEEE Press, 1995), p. 76.
6. Albert Bigelow Paine, In One Man’s Life: Being Chapters from the Personal & Business Career of Theodore N. Vail (1921; London: Forgotten Books, 2012), p. 275.
7. The transmission moved by wire to Arlington, Virginia, where it was flung into the air by AT&T’s new transmission station.
8. Paine, In One Man’s Life, p. 281.
9. Ibid., p. 283.
10. Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 297.
11. Tom Farley, “The Cell-Phone Revolution,” American Heritage 22, no. 3 (Winter 2007).
12. Gertner, Idea Factory, p. 280.
13. Ibid., p. 281.
14. Farley, “Cell-Phone Revolution.”
15. As a result of the antitrust lawsuit United States v. AT&T, the company entered a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice on January 8, 1982, under which on January 1, 1984, the company would divest itself of the regional operating companies.
16. Farley, “Cell-Phone Revolution.”
17. Robert Roche, vice president, research, CTIA: The Wireless Associa
tion; email correspondence with author, August 12, 2009.
18. S. J. Blumberg and J. V. Luke, “Wireless Substitution: Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, January–June 2012,” National Center for Health Statistics, December 2012 (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhis.htm).
19. Study by Robert Jensen of Harvard of coastal village of Kerala, The Economist, Special Report, September 26, 2009, p. 7.
20. “A Doctor in Your Pocket, Health Hotlines in Developing Countries,” GSMA Development Fund, 2009.
21. “Airtime Is Money,” The Economist, January 19, 2013.
22. Jokko Initiative: Mobile Technology Amplifying Social Change (www .tostan.org).
23. Geneva Health Forum (www.ghf10.org/reports/209).
24. World Bank study by Christine Zhan-Wei Qiang, The Economist, Special Report, September 26, 2009, p. 7.
25. A discussion of One Laptop Per Child can be found at http://laptop.org.
26. Cisco Corporation, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Forecast Update, 2016–2021,” Cisco.com, March 29, 2017 (www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/mobile-white-paper-c11-520862.html).
27. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; New York: Dover, 1995), p. 34.
28. “The Mobiles: Social Evolution in a Wireless Society,” Context Research Group, 2002.
29. Rich Ling, New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (MIT Press, 2008).
30. Rich Ling, The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society (Burlington, Mass.: Morgan Kauffman, 2004), p. 214n.
31. Tolu Oguniesi, “Seven Ways Mobile Phones Have Changed Lives in Africa,” CNN, September 13, 2012.
32. Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Benjamin J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century (Washington, D.C. AEI Press, 2001), p. 24.
33. Judith Flanders, The Making of Home (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), p. 49.
34. The concept of “historical reintegration” was first proposed by James Katz of Rutgers University. See The Economist, April 12, 2008.
35. Paine, In One Man’s Life, p. 283.
36. Walter A. McDougall, Throes of Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 150 (cows and hens); Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist (New York: HarperPerennial, 2010), p. 283.
37. Judith Nicholson, “Sick Cell: Representations of Cellular Telephone Use in North America,” Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 3 (June 2001).
38. Denise Grady, “Cellphones Are Still Safe for Humans, Researchers Say,” New York Times, February 2, 2018.
39. Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American 265, no. 3 (September 1991), pp. 66–75.
40. “eCall—Saving Lives through In-Vehicle Communication Technology,” European Commission, August 2009.
41. Roxie Hammil and Mike Hendricks, “Gadgets to Help Tend a Garden,” New York Times, April 24, 2013.
42. Don Clark, “Take Two Digital Pills and Call Me in the Morning,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2009.
43. “New High-Tech Sensor-Laden Carpet May Revolutionize Building Security,” Defense Review, April 15, 2005.
Chapter 8
1. Rhoda Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations (New York: T. Y. Crowell Co., 1970), p. 280.
2. Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
3. The topic of open networks is an essential predicate to optimizing these new networks. The most divisive issue during my tenure at the FCC was the Open Internet Order, which imposed on internet service providers the obligation to behave as a nondiscriminatory common carrier and carry all traffic free of blocking, throttling, or payment for priority handling. Absent an open internet, network operators become gatekeepers free to discriminate to advantage themselves. Unfortunately, the Trump FCC has eliminated those protections.
4. The typical telegraph operator could transmit at 3 bits per second; 25,000,000 bits/sec. ÷ 3 bits/sec. = 8.33 million-fold increase in speed.
5. Farhad Manjoo, “How Amazon’s Long Game Yielded a Retail Juggernaut,” New York Times, November 18, 2015.
6. While the network may have created information such as boxcar loadings or the number of news dispatches sent, it was an ancillary by-product.
7. M. G. Siegler, “Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up to 2003,” TechCrunch, August 4, 2010.
8. “Data Age 2025” (https://www.idc.com/prodserv/custom-solutions/RESOURCES/ATTACHMENTS/thought-leadership-cs.pdf).
9. Jon Gertner, “Behind GE’s Vision for the Industrial Internet of Things,” Fast Company, June/July 2014.
10. Siegler, “Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days.”
11. David B. Angus, “Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease,” New York Times, February 6, 2016.
12. Bobbie Johnson, “Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder,” The Guardian, January 10, 2010.
13. Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4 (1890), pp. 193–220.
14. Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, and Nora Draper, The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploitation, a report from the Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, June 2015.
15. Although the Supreme Court has held privacy to be the central reason for the Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure, and has asserted a so-called “constitutional right to privacy” (Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479), neither the word “privacy” nor the concept itself is ever explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.
16. One internet service provider, AT&T, appropriately discloses how it collects a staggering amount of information on each subscriber through “a combination of information from wireless and WiFi locations, TV viewing, calling and texting records, website browsing and mobile application usage and other information we have about you and other customers” (http://www.att.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=13692).
17. Unfortunately, in the very early days of the Trump administration Congress repealed these protections.
18. “Technology at Work,” Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions, February 2015, p. 16.
19. Cecilia Kang, “No One in Washington Is Talking about the Problems with the Sharing Economy, Except This Lawmaker,” Washington Post, June 26, 2015.
20. Burson-Marsteller, The Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative, Time, “Forty-Five Million Americans Say They Have Worked in the On-Demand Economy,” January 6, 2016, polling by Penn Schoen Berland.
21. Thomas W. Malone and Robert Laubacher, “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy,” Harvard Business Review, September-October 1998.
22. Dave Masters, “Say Goodbye to the ‘9 to 5’: Futurologist Makes Five Predictions for the Workplace of the Future,” Daily Record, December 23, 2016.
23. See Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker, The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
24. Quentin Hardy, “Gearing Up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt or Else,” New York Times, February 13, 2016.
25. J. H. A. Bone, “Old English Guilds and Trade Unions,” Atlantic Monthly 39, no. 231 (March 1877), p. 284.
26. The Guild of Palmers of Ludlow (England) provided that “if any member becomes a leper, or blind, or maimed in limb, or smitten with any other incurable disorder (which God forbid!) we wish that the goods of the guild be largely bestowed on him.” Bone, “Old English Guilds and Trade Unions,” p. 284.
27. I first heard this great description expressed by Ong Ye Kung, Singapore’s minister of education.
28. Flipping the teaching process has even reached the gridiron. Urban Meyer, head football coach at Ohio State University, has abandoned diagramming plays on the chalkboard. Now coaches send each player a video or graphical representation of what they are to learn and the players watch on their computers o
r mobile devices. Team meetings are used to ensure the players understand the use of that information. Jonathan Clegg, “How Urban Meyer Took the Buckeyes to School,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2014.
29. Marketplace staff, “Conversations about Mobility, Live from Aspen,” NPR Marketplace, June 29, 2015, audio interview with Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton.
30. Alec Ross, senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, discussion with author.
31. Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Seventh Sense (New York: Little, Brown, 2016), p. 34.
32. “Estonia Is Putting Its Country in the Cloud and Offering Virtual Residency,” The Conversation, March 26, 2017.
33. James Madison, The Federalist No. 10 (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 57, 58.
34. The talk in which Ghonim makes these points is discussed by Thomas Friedman, “Social Media: Destroyer or Creator?,” New York Times, February 3, 2016.
35. Porter Bibb, It Ain’t As Easy As It Looks (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), p. 180.
36. Mark R. Robertson, “300+ Hours of Video Uploaded to YouTube Every Minute,” TubularInsights: Video Marketing Insights (YouTube video), November 21, 2014.
37. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, “End Times,” June 10, 2009.
38. Michael Barthel, Elisa Shearer, Jeffrey Gottfried, and Amy Mitchell, “The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook,” Pew Research Center, July 14, 2015.
39. Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), p. 3.
40. Author’s conversation with Ron Nessen, November 28, 2015.
41. Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 3.
42. James B. Stewart, “Facebook Has 50 Minutes of Your Time Each Day. It Wants More,” New York Times, May 5, 2016.
43. Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?,” Journal of Marketing Research 49, no. 2 (April 2012), pp. 192–205.
44. Craig Silverman, “Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News on Facebook,” BuzzFeed, November 16, 2016.
45. William J. Bernstein, Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History (New York: Grove Press, 2013), p. 155.
46. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. The number living in extreme poverty decreased from 1.75 billion people in 1990 to 702.1 million in 2015, or from 37.1 percent of the world population to 9.6 percent. World Bank, Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016 (www.worldbank.org/en/publication/global-monitoring-report).
