Is Tim Wu's The Master Switch Inevitable?

Tim Wu's The Master Switch is a great work of history;  the real question is - is its predicted outcome inevitable? Wu traces the development and ultimate consolidation of a number of information industries - telegraphy, movies, radio, television, telephony - from a dispersed group of competitors to a small group of oligopolists or a single monopolist. Wu calls this pattern of development the "Cycle" and then, of course, applies these historical findings to the newest information industry/infrastructure, the Internet. Wu draws parallels but not conclusions - he's far too cautious an academic for that. Yet the conclusion seems inevitable - that despite its distributed architecture, we are subject to (and may be already seeing the rise of) Net oligopolies. No, this is not about outright state intervention in Net access (e.g., the "Chinese Internet"), though that possibility remains strong in certain societies (witness the attempts of repressive governments to censor or block Twitter and Google). Rather, it is about the importance of the Net to both day-to-day life and to political and self expression, and the threat to that posed by emerging oligopolies. One need not look far to see emergent oligopolies (can one imagine a viable competitor to Facebook in the pure social sharing space, despite the IPO flop? Or a serious competitor to Google in search/traffic metrics?) and oligopolistic behavior (eg, device manufacturers prohibiting jailbreaking even by knowledgeable hackers). Yet we are not yet at the point of the three television networks of the 1940's controlling all the flow of televised data and we may well never be - because of the distributed nature of Net architecture, because of the (still) varied ways in which it can be accessed, because of the diligence of certain parties in exposing this danger (eg, Wu, the EFF),and because of the constitutional nature of the protection of speech (even though the Net is essentially privately-owned and controlled, though government (ARPA) invented - sorry Al Gore). Wu is right to raise these concerns and to show that in industry after industry involving data, this "Cycle" has run its path. It may be frightening to rely on antitrust enforcement as a real backstop, since its enforcement varies from administration to administration - but it is a strong tool. What remains to be seen is the level of political will to enforce it should further consolidation in pipes (mobile operators, satellite, cable, et al.) or further strengthening of the competitive position of dominant incumbents (like Google and Facebook) prove anti-competitive. The distributed architecture of the Net standing alone will not save it from oligopoly or restriction. It is incumbent upon us the users - and our legal system - to guard carefully, having been properly warned by Wu. History is not destiny, unless we allow it to so become.