The rise of the despot may be good news for the people of the kingdom -- at first. Mussolini making the trains run on time and all that. But just as Early Elvis became Late Elvis, inevitably the powerful turn tyrannical, becoming enemies of innovation, focused chiefly on strangling the next disruptive technology in the crib.

Wu marshals powerful historical evidence, but the lessons one draws from his book is the policy equivalent of a Rorschach Test. Already the Wall Street Journal has run not one but two reviews concluding that The Master Switch proves the need for Less Regulation. The Huffington Post, in contrast, has a piece concluding that the book proves the need for More.

Wu's own prescription -- described in the last 20 pages, after 300 pages of history told relatively straight -- is the so-called Separations Principle. This is the idea that information companies in the digital age must be required to stay in a single "horizontal" line of business. Either you create content (TV, movies, print), or organize content (search engines, social networking), or build devices to access content (phones, tablets), or deliver content (broadband). But please only one, thank you very much.

The reason, says Wu, is the same reason we have checks and balances in the Constitution. We can't have Apple (via the iPad, iPhone, and iTunes) or Google (via search) also controlling the content that we can read and watch. And Wu believes that this applies with particular force to the broadband companies like Verizon, AT&T, or Comcast, because Internet access is now the "last mile" pipe that carries all modern communications.

Wu's vision has its strengths and weaknesses. A serious appraisal would take a second book nearly as long. But one thing is clear, namely that to Wall Street and many existing businesses it is heresy and treason. This is because nearly all of the nation's large information and technology companies are, in varying degrees, desperate to expand "vertically" -- into content, organization, devices, and delivery. Comcast buying NBC. Apple moving into music and video.

One way to understand the profound disconnect between Wall Street's vision and Wu's is as another in the many fights between town and gown. Skeptically, as an academic not subject to the discipline of meeting a payroll. Or, sympathetically, as a visionary free to pursue the public interest rather than an incumbent's bottom line.

Washington is of course the place where academic dreams of massively restructuring private industry often go to die. And Wu's vision doesn't go anywhere if government won't make it mandatory.

But counting his ideas dead on arrival would also be to ignore a more recent history. Wu and a group of closely aligned left academics have shown a genius for setting the agenda in Washington over the past decade -- although the jury is still out on how much they will actually get.