u003cbu003eu003cbru003eA u003ciu003eNew York Timesu003c/iu003e Book Review Editors' Choiceu003c/bu003e u003cbu003eAn Amazon Best Business & Leadership Book of 2017u003cbru003eu003c/bu003e u003cbu003eLonglisted for u003ciu003eFinancial Tiu003c/iu003emes/McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2017 u003c/bu003e A strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017u003cbru003eu003cbru003eA stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age.u003ciu003eu003cbru003eu003cbru003eMove Fast and Break Things u003c/iu003eis the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms--Facebook, Amazon, and Google--that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries.u003cbru003eu003cbru003eJonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: overlooking piracy of books, music, and film while hiding behind opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users in order to create the surveillance-marketing monoculture in which we now live. u003cbru003eu003cbru003eThe enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70 percent; book publishing, film, and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Today, Google's YouTube controls 60 percent of all streaming-audio business but pay for only 11 percent of the total streaming-audio revenues artists receive. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of that content.u003cbru003eu003cbru003eThe stakes here go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, as well as music and other forms of entertainment, from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy. u003ciu003eMove Fast and Break Thingsu003c/iu003e offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half-century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it.u003cbru003eu003cbru003e