The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Astra Taylor
than one in seven people on the planet; Amazon controls one-tenth of all American online commerce and its swiftly expanding cloud computing services host the data and traffic of hundreds of thousands of companies located in almost two hundred countries, an estimated one-third of all Internet users accessing Amazon’s cloud at least once a day; and Apple, which sits on almost $140 billion in cash reserves, jockeys with Exxon Mobil for the title of the most valuable company on earth, with a valuation exceeding the GDP (gross domestic product) of most nations.29
Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players. Thus an independent musician like Rebecca Gates is squeezed from both sides. Off-line, local radio stations have been absorbed by Clear Channel and the major labels control more of the music market than they did before the Internet emerged. And online Gates has to position herself and her work on a monopolists’ platform or risk total invisibility.
Monopolies, contrary to early expectations, prosper online, where winner-take-all markets emerge partly as a consequence of Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network increases exponentially by the number of connections or users: the more people have telephones or have social media profiles or use a search engine, the more valuable those services become. (Counterintuitively, given his outspoken libertarian views, PayPal founder and first Facebook investor Peter Thiel has declared competition overrated and praised monopolies for improving margins.30) What’s more, many of the emerging info-monopolies now dabble in hardware, software, and content, building their businesses at every possible level, vertically integrating as in the analog era.
This is the contradiction at the center of the new information system: the more customized and user friendly our computers and mobile devices are, the more connected we are to an extensive and opaque circuit of machines that coordinate and keep tabs on our activities; everything is accessible and individualized, but only through companies that control the network from the bottom up.31 Amazon strives to control both the bookshelf and the book and everything in between. It makes devices, offers cloud computing services, and has begun to produce its own content, starting various publishing imprints before expanding to feature film production.32 Google is taking a similar approach, having expanded from search into content, operating system design, retail, gadget manufacturing, robotics, “smart” appliances, self-driving cars, debit cards, and fiber broadband.
More troublingly, at least for those who believed the Internet upstarts would inevitably vanquish the establishment dinosaurs, are the ways the new and old players have melded. Condé Nast bought Reddit, Fox has a stake in Vice Media, Time Warner bet on Maker Studios (which is behind some of YouTube’s biggest stars), Apple works intimately with Hollywood and AT&T, Facebook joined forces with Microsoft and the major-label-backed Spotify, and Twitter is trumpeting its utility to television programmers. Google, in addition to cozying up to the phone companies that use its Android operating system, has struck partnership deals with entertainment companies including Disney, Paramount, ABC, 20th Century Fox, and Sony Pictures while making numerous overtures to network and cable executives in hopes of negotiating a paid online television service.33
Google has licensing agreements with the big record companies for its music-streaming service and holds stake alongside Sony and Universal in Vevo, the music video site that is also the most viewed “channel” on YouTube.34 YouTube has attempted to partly remake itself in television’s image, investing a small fortune in professionally produced Web series, opening studios for creators in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and seeking “brand safe” and celebrity-driven content to attract more advertising revenue.35 “Top YouTube execs like to say they’re creating the next generation of cable TV, built and scaled for the web,” reports Ad Age. “But instead of 500-odd channels on TV, YouTube is making a play for the ‘next 10,000,’ appealing to all sorts of niches and interest groups.”36
Though audiences may be smaller as a consequence of this fragmentation, they will be more engaged and more thoroughly monitored and marketed to than traditional television viewers.37 As Lessig predicted, the “limitations of twentieth-century advertising” are indeed being overcome. As a consequence, the future being fashioned perpetuates and expands upon the defects of the earlier system instead of forging a new path.
Meanwhile, the captains of industry leading the charge toward mergers and acquisitions within the media sphere cynically invoke the Internet to justify their grand designs. Who can complain, they shrug, if one fellow owns a multibillion-dollar empire when anyone can start a Web site for next to nothing? The subject of antitrust investigations in Europe and the United States, Google executives respond to allegations that the company abuses its dominance in search to give its own services an advantage by insisting that on the Internet “competition is one click away.”
Such is Rupert Murdoch’s view of things as well. Not long before the phone-hacking scandal brought down his tabloid News of the World, Murdoch made a bid for BSkyB, a move that would have given him control of over half of the television market in the UK. He assured the British House of Lords that concerns about ownership and consolidation were “ten years out of date” given the abundance of news outlets for people to choose from online. The House of Lords, however, was not convinced, as a lengthy report to Parliament made clear: “We do not accept that the increase of news sources invalidates the case for special treatment of the media through ownership regulation. We believe that there is still a danger that if media ownership becomes too concentrated the diversity of voices available could be diminished.”38
In the United States, however, even the core attribute of the Internet’s openness, so disingenuously deployed by the likes of Murdoch, is under threat. The nation’s leading cable lobbying group has a phalanx of full-time staff campaigning against Net neutrality—the idea that government regulation should ensure that the Internet stay an open platform, one where service providers cannot slow down or block certain Web sites to stifle competition or charge others a fee to speed up their traffic.
Ironically, the effort is headed by ex-FCC (Federal Communications Commission) chairman Michael Powell, who, in 2003, began his abdication of his role as public servant by publishing an op-ed in which he argued against government intervention in the media marketplace. “The bottomless well of information called the Internet” makes ownership rules simply unnecessary, a throwback to “the bygone era of black-and-white television,” Powell wrote, positively invoking the very attributes of the Internet he is now paid handsomely to undermine. (In 2013 the revolving door came full circle when Tom Wheeler became Chairman of the FCC; Wheeler once stood at the helm of the same lobbying organization Powell now presides over.)39
Based on the principle of common carriage—rules first established under English common law and applied initially to things like canals, highways, and railroads and later to telegraph and telephone lines—advocates of Net neutrality seek to extend this tradition to our twenty-first-century communications system, prohibiting the owners of a network from abusing their power by discriminating against anyone’s data, whether by slowing or stopping it or charging more to speed it up. They hope to defend the openness of the Internet by securing federal regulation that would guarantee that all bits, no matter who is sending or receiving them, are treated equally. The images and text on your personal Web site, they maintain, should be delivered as swiftly as Amazon or CNN’s front page.
Telecom companies have something different in mind. AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, and others recognize that they could boost revenue significantly by charging for preferential service—adding a “fast lane” to the “information superhighway,” as critics have described their plan. Service providers, for example, could ban the services of rivals outright, decide to privilege content they own while throttling everything else, or start charging content providers to have their Web sites load faster, prioritizing those who pay the most—all three scenarios putting newcomers and independents at a substantial and potentially devastating disadvantage while favoring the already consolidated and well capitalized.
The Internet is best thought of as a series of layers: a physical layer, a code layer, and a content layer. The bottom “physical,” or ISP (Internet service provider) layer, is made up of the cables