Presiding over the landmark Microsoft antitrust case, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson made international headlines when he compared Microsoft's market power to the hegemony enjoyed by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil a century ago. But perhaps another, less chronicled story actually serves as a better model for what is happening today and what may yet take place in the years to come. Way back during the birth of broadcasting, a largely forgotten but portentous battle raged between a lone inventor and the indomitable mogul at the helm of the first electronic media-age monopoly. The conflict differed sharply from the Rockefeller case, which involved the supply of a physical product-oil-as well as the system for piping and transporting this commodity. By contrast, the primary product in broadcasting was information, broadly defined. And the primary issue at hand wasn't pricing but innovation itself.

Innovation in the early days of radio was controlled so tightly by David Sarnoff, the stocky, domineering, Russian-born visionary who led the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), that the federal government was compelled to investigate. What government trustbusters found was something that had been obvious to industry insiders for years: Sarnoff's company had an iron grip on every aspect of radio, from the patents on the device itself to the creation and distribution of programming. "Sarnoff was the Bill Gates of his age," says Thomas Lento, director of communications for the Sarnoff Corp., a Princeton, N.J., research lab spun off from RCA in the late 1980s. "RCA had a stranglehold over an entire sector of the economy." But it was Sarnoff's move to capture the next big thing, television, and his plot to destroy the ambitious young inventor behind the new technology, that sent sparks flying.