via Ars Technica by editors@arstechnica.com (Ars Staff) on 12/20/10 
In Internet time, things change fast. Google is moving into television. WikiLeaks is changing the paradigm of international relations. Newspapers, movies, radio and TV are all available on handheld devices. And the FCC is poised to act on far-reaching rules of the road for the Internet. Four new books offer different maps of this territory from different angles, none capturing completely the thin line we tread between information utopia and a preprogrammed cultural dystopia.
One book, Internet Architecture and Innovation, is by Stanford’s resident expert at the intersection of engineering, economics, and law, Barbara van Schewick, and it looks at these issues in a business context. Van Schewick compares how open and closed systems impact innovation in the electronic space. Her book is crammed with information, making the footnotes sometimes more interesting than the text, which is dense and often delivered at a level of abstraction that makes it almost unreadable.
Nonetheless, Internet Architecture and Innovation is an important work: it supplies a key piece of the broadband puzzle in its consideration of broadband transport as a necessary input for many other businesses. Just like the railroads in the time of Hiram Johnson, broadband increasingly occupies a bottleneck position, giving network operators an inbred advantage in a horde of ancillary businesses. This can be particularly devastating for entrepreneurs who hope to take the broadband input and make something new out of it (think Google, Wikipedia, Facebook). Van Schewick’s fundamental premise rings true: only neutral networks promote competition and innovation.
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