<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Orsan Senalp</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com">orsan1234@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 4:53 AM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> Interview with Robert McChesney: How can Internet be De-monopolized?<br>To: <a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a><br>
<br><br><div dir="auto"><div>An insightful interview via Gurnstein and Stalder. <br>Orsan</div><div><br>Begin forwarded message:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>Resent-From:</b> <a href="mailto:nettime@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime@kein.org</a><br>
<b>From:</b> Felix Stalder <<a href="mailto:felix@openflows.com" target="_blank">felix@openflows.com</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 23 april 2014 10:12:13 CEST<br><b>Resent-To:</b> Nettime <<a href="mailto:nettime-l@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime-l@kein.org</a>><br>
<b>To:</b> "<a href="mailto:nettime-l@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime-l@kein.org</a>" <<a href="mailto:nettime-l@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime-l@kein.org</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b><nettime> Interview with Robert McChesney: How can Internet be De-monopolized?</b><br>
<br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>This interview is from the Just Net Coalition publication that Michael</span><br><span>Gurnstein referred to in his most recent email. Felix</span><br><span></span><br>
<span></span><br><span>Interview with Robert McChesney: How can Internet be De-monopolized?</span><br><span>Sally Burch </span><br><span>2014-04-16</span><br><span><a href="http://alainet.org/active/73020" target="_blank">http://alainet.org/active/73020</a></span><br>
<span></span><br><span></span><br><span>“Left on their current course and driven by the needs of capital,</span><br><span>digital technologies can be deployed in ways that are extraordinarily</span><br><span>inimical to freedom, democracy, and anything remotely connected to the</span><br>
<span>good life. Therefore battles over the Internet are of central importance</span><br><span>for all those seeking to build a better society”, writes researcher</span><br><span>Robert McChesney in the conclusion of his book Digital Disconnect: How</span><br>
<span>Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy[1]. Professor at</span><br><span>the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, McChesney studies the</span><br><span>history and political economy of communication. He is also co-founder of</span><br>
<span>Free Press, a national media reform organization in the USA. In the</span><br><span>following interview with ALAI, he summarizes the arguments of his book,</span><br><span>with emphasis on the tendency of the Internet economy to promote monopolies.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span></span><br><span>- How would you characterize the evolution of the Internet over the past</span><br><span>two decades?</span><br><span></span><br><span>- To summarize I would say that the Internet began as a function of the</span><br>
<span>public sector. It was started by government subsidies and was</span><br><span>non-commercial, even anti-commercial, in its earliest days. The vision</span><br><span>that developed of it was always of an egalitarian, nonprofit sector</span><br>
<span>where people would come together and share. But the process starting in</span><br><span>the early 1990s, especially after the development of the World Wide Web,</span><br><span>has been towards its intense commercialization on one hand, and on the</span><br>
<span>other hand, of an aggressive interest in the importance of the Internet</span><br><span>by military, national security, intelligence and police agencies. Those</span><br><span>two forces have really made the Internet their own in the last 20 years</span><br>
<span>in a way that I think very few people, as recently as <a href="tel:1993" value="+661993" target="_blank">1993</a> or <a href="tel:1995" value="+661995" target="_blank">1995</a>,</span><br><span>thought possible.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>- At the global level, what do you see as the main implications of this</span><br><span>evolution?</span><br><span></span><br><span>- One of the great claims about the Internet was that it was going to</span><br>
<span>spur economic efficiency, growth, competition. It was going to open up</span><br><span>the economy for new players, especially for small businesses and new</span><br><span>entrepreneurs to get in the game and be able to compete with larger</span><br>
<span>entrenched corporations and businesses, because the Internet would allow</span><br><span>them to make an end-run around the barriers to entry that kept them away</span><br><span>from consumers and markets. It also was regarded as the place where</span><br>
<span>consumers would be suddenly empowered because they’d have more choice,</span><br><span>and they’d have more leverage using the Internet to get lower prices and</span><br><span>better service from companies.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>Unfortunately almost none of this has come true in any meaningful sense,</span><br><span>and one of the great ironies of the Internet is that is has become the</span><br><span>greatest generator of economic monopoly ever known, in any economic</span><br>
<span>system, certainly under capitalism. Instead of producing competitive</span><br><span>markets and lots of successful entrepreneurs, Internet has done just the</span><br><span>opposite, because of network economics, where basically it’s</span><br>
<span>winner-takes-all economics. Once someone gets in first place, there’s</span><br><span>tremendous incentive for everyone to use that service, such as search,</span><br><span>for example, or E-Bay or You-Tube. You use the same search because you</span><br>
<span>want to be on the network that everyone else is on, and you get what’s</span><br><span>called a “natural monopoly” through the network effects.</span><br><span></span><br><span>When we look at the Internet, it is filled with these monopolies,</span><br>
<span>there’s no “middle-class” of 20 or 30 competing companies in an area.</span><br><span>It’s usually one company that dominates it with maybe one or two others</span><br><span>that have a little bit of the action. And it has really accentuated and</span><br>
<span>aggravated the problem of monopoly in modern capitalism, which is one of</span><br><span>the great problems, of course, of the world economy.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Now this is especially true outside of the US because – perhaps not</span><br>
<span>coincidentally – the dominant monopolies of the global Internet –and it</span><br><span>is a global phenomenon– are American based. Google, Microsoft, Apple,</span><br><span>Amazon, EBay, Facebook, are US-based firms. So these are companies that</span><br>
<span>have inordinate power outside of the US, and I think for people living</span><br><span>in countries outside the US, their dominance is of particular concern.</span><br><span></span><br><span>- And what are the repercussions of these dynamics in terms of democracy?</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>- Democracy has a lot of components, and one of the great claims of the</span><br><span>Internet was that it was going to make it possible for average people,</span><br><span>those without property, to participate in politics in a way that never</span><br>
<span>was thinkable prior to the Internet. That you could have access to all</span><br><span>the information that only elites used to get. You could communicate with</span><br><span>like-minded people inexpensively and establish networks that would be</span><br>
<span>very powerful, that would shake that power and force it to either leave</span><br><span>power or to respond to the democratic aspirations of the people. And it</span><br><span>has had an element of that, let’s be clear; there have been many</span><br>
<span>positive aspects of the Internet for enhancing the power of those at the</span><br><span>bottom against the top. But when those claims were made, it was</span><br><span>forgotten that those at the top also owned computers. In fact, they own</span><br>
<span>computer companies, they own the networks, and they too know what</span><br><span>they’re doing, and they’re doing it to win, they’re not playing by the</span><br><span>rules. And what they’re doing is to neutralize the threat of the</span><br>
<span>Internet as a democratic force that can arrest or challenge elite power.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Now one of the crucial areas this takes place – one that I study and</span><br><span>write a great deal about – is the great crisis of journalism worldwide</span><br>
<span>and in the US. As you go increasingly into the digital world, there’s no</span><br><span>way for journalism to be supported anywhere near a satisfactory manner,</span><br><span>to have sufficient reporters covering people in social life, keeping</span><br>
<span>tabs on people in power and what they’re up to.</span><br><span></span><br><span>In a nutshell, the reason for this is that advertising in the digital</span><br><span>era operates very differently than it did before the Internet. Before we</span><br>
<span>had the Internet, the advertiser would buy an ad and the newspaper would</span><br><span>use a significant amount of money from that ad to pay for the content;</span><br><span>that’s how they paid journalists. Advertising provided most of the</span><br>
<span>revenues to most commercial news media in the world. In the digital era</span><br><span>advertisers no longer need to pay for the content. They have found a</span><br><span>more efficient way to reach final consumers. They can simply go to one</span><br>
<span>of the big ad networks like the ones run by AOL, Google, Microsoft or</span><br><span>Yahoo, and they say: we want to reach 30 million women aged 18 to 25,</span><br><span>who might be in the market to buy new shoes in the next three months.</span><br>
<span>They’ll find those 30 million women right away, wherever they are on the</span><br><span>Internet, because those companies know everywhere you go, there’s no</span><br><span>such thing as privacy on the Internet. So the advertisers don’t need to</span><br>
<span>pay a website for anything more than the cost of the one person they’re</span><br><span>trying to hit there. The website gets much less money and that’s why</span><br><span>online journalism is basically not solvent commercially. The advertising</span><br>
<span>money has gone, and that accounted for well over half the revenues that</span><br><span>paid for journalism over the years. This is causing an enormous crisis</span><br><span>worldwide.</span><br><span></span><br><span>By this, I’m not saying that journalism was great before. Much of my</span><br>
<span>work has been on the severe limitations of commercial journalism, which</span><br><span>is true in Latin America as in North America, if not more so. But the</span><br><span>starting point of journalism is that you’ve got to have someone who can</span><br>
<span>do it, and eat. Someone who has time and the expertise to cover</span><br><span>sometimes complicated stories about national security, or the</span><br><span>environment, or economics. Ideally, you want competing news firms, so if</span><br>
<span>someone misses a story someone else will get it. All that is all</span><br><span>disappearing now. Commercial interests are jumping ship; they say we</span><br><span>can’t make money doing journalism. And that leaves us very far short of</span><br>
<span>a democratic society. It should be Mission A, Job No. 1 for people</span><br><span>committed to democracy, to set up institutions and resources to provide</span><br><span>media and journalism, and ultimately culture, to communities that the</span><br>
<span>market is no longer interested in. I think these all have to be</span><br><span>non-profit and non-commercial entities to be effective. The market</span><br><span>simply has given up on journalism and it should go its way now.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>That means, if we’re going to have credible, independent, competitive</span><br><span>news media – and it will be digital – the resources are going to have to</span><br><span>come from the public. The great challenge we face in democratic</span><br>
<span>societies is how do we do that? All countries need to be looking at that</span><br><span>very seriously.</span><br><span></span><br><span>- Coming back to the issue of monopolies… in a globalized economy,</span><br>
<span>global political agreements and institutions are needed to establish the</span><br><span>necessary rules, controls and checks on its functioning, in the public</span><br><span>interest (as most nation states have to limit monopolies at the national</span><br>
<span>level). But these international spaces are increasingly captured by the</span><br><span>same global corporations that they should be controlling. With respect</span><br><span>to the Internet, what do you see as the key issues to take on in terms</span><br>
<span>of global governance?</span><br><span></span><br><span>- I think your question is so good that it has part of the answer,</span><br><span>because global trade, economic and governance arrangements are crucial,</span><br>
<span>especially for the Internet. Unfortunately, because there is so much</span><br><span>money now in the Internet, these governance arrangements are dominated</span><br><span>by huge monopolistic companies that are so wealthy and so powerful that</span><br>
<span>they can call on the US government to be their private police force. The</span><br><span>global function now of the US government is to protect the interests of</span><br><span>these private monopolies. It never does anything against their interest.</span><br>
<span>That means that the ability of nation states in Europe, Latin America,</span><br><span>Africa or Asia to countermand these pressures, to set up their own</span><br><span>autonomous digital realm, is much more difficult without effectively</span><br>
<span>taking on the entire economic structure of the world.</span><br><span></span><br><span>- You have been involved in some of the big battles taking place in the</span><br><span>US around freedom, rights, democracy and the Internet. What do you see</span><br>
<span>as the main issues at present?</span><br><span></span><br><span>- In my view the big issues in the US, and I think to varying degrees</span><br><span>worldwide, are threefold. First, on the issue of getting serious funding</span><br>
<span>for independent, non-profit, non-commercial, uncensored and competitive</span><br><span>news media institutions, at the local and national level, we are working</span><br><span>with colleagues on the idea of having a US$200 voucher of federal money</span><br>
<span>that anyone can give to a news medium of their choice. So you’d have a</span><br><span>huge public subsidy of non-profit news media, but the government</span><br><span>wouldn’t control who gets the money, the people would.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>The second great issue in this country – and probably everywhere – is</span><br><span>that control over access to Internet and to cellphones is limited to</span><br><span>just three companies: Comcast, Verizon and AT&T. There are a few other</span><br>
<span>companies in the game, like Sprint and T-Mobile, but the big three set</span><br><span>the terms and everybody else follows. They have divided up the market</span><br><span>like a cartel, they don’t compete with each other, their prices are high</span><br>
<span>so Americans pay an incredible amount of money for cell phones and</span><br><span>Internet access for a very mediocre service. It’s really outrageous. We</span><br><span>need a campaign in the US – or internationally – to take Internet</span><br>
<span>service provision out of the hands of private monopolies, and make it</span><br><span>like the post-office. Internet access should be a human right; the</span><br><span>government should run it and then the costs would come tumbling down. It</span><br>
<span>will be a difficult fight, because these companies are world-class</span><br><span>lobbyists, they own all the politicians, but their existence is really</span><br><span>illegitimate. They do nothing of value, except gouge us for</span><br>
<span>super-monopoly profits to give us lousy service.</span><br><span></span><br><span>The third area –and this brings us back to the question of natural</span><br><span>monopolies – is that there comes a point where you have three choices in</span><br>
<span>a democratic society about how you deal with monopolies. Now, the way</span><br><span>economists use the term monopoly basically means a company that has so</span><br><span>much market share that it can set prices on the whole industry and it</span><br>
<span>can determine how much competition it has. If it wanted to rub everyone</span><br><span>out of 100% of the market, it could probably do it, but that would hurt</span><br><span>its profits, so it settles for a lower percentage of the market and less</span><br>
<span>people stay on the margins, but it gets the maximum profit it can in the</span><br><span>industry. That’s the sort of monopoly world we’re looking at. John D.</span><br><span>Rockefeller, at the peak of his Standard Oil monopoly, did not have 100%</span><br>
<span>of the oil market in the US, I believe his peak percentage was in the</span><br><span>low 80s, but he was in a situation where if he wanted to, he had the</span><br><span>power to lower the price to drive people out of business. It just wasn’t</span><br>
<span>in his interest to do so. Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and</span><br><span>Paypal all have Standard Oil type of monopolies, and as a rule the only</span><br><span>competition they face in their core monopoly markets comes from the</span><br>
<span>other companies. So Google has a successful search, then of course</span><br><span>Microsoft will have a competitor one. There are no independent companies</span><br><span>competing with them, as they all get bought up along the way.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>So what are we going to do about these monopolies that are completely</span><br><span>antithetical to democratic theory? This isn’t even a progressive notion.</span><br><span>Milton Friedman – the right-wing conservative economist, whose legacy in</span><br>
<span>Latin America, thanks to the Pinochet era, is quite dark – was the first</span><br><span>one to argue that the defense of capitalism in a democratic society was</span><br><span>that the people who ran the economy didn’t run the government. Power was</span><br>
<span>diffused and that allowed freedom to prosper, unlike feudalism, unlike</span><br><span>existing communism then, where the people who ran the government also</span><br><span>ran the economy. The key to Friedman’s argument was that the economic</span><br>
<span>market had to be competitive. If it was dominated by a few giant firms,</span><br><span>those giant firms would invariably and inevitably take over the</span><br><span>government, and then that whole premise of democracy collapses like a</span><br>
<span>house of cards. That’s why, in democratic theory, from both the right</span><br><span>and the left, monopoly economic power has always been a crisis.</span><br><span></span><br><span>In that context, there are three choices of what society can do. One,</span><br>
<span>you can keep the private monopoly power and then try to regulate it in</span><br><span>the public interest. In the US we did it for a long time with the</span><br><span>telephone company AT&T and we still try to do it a little with our phone</span><br>
<span>and cable companies. But the evidence is that it doesn’t work. These</span><br><span>companies are too big, they capture the regulators, they own the</span><br><span>government and the regulation is largely ineffectual; so you still have</span><br>
<span>monopoly gouging you and the monopolists run the government. That’s</span><br><span>really not a good solution.</span><br><span></span><br><span>The second solution is to try to break up the monopoly into smaller</span><br>
<span>units that would actually compete. So instead of having one oil company,</span><br><span>such as Standard Oil, you would break it up into 5, 10 or 15 that would</span><br><span>compete with each other and give you the benefits of market competition</span><br>
<span>without having the detriments of monopoly control of the government.</span><br><span>Unfortunately, in the case of the Internet that’s really not possible.</span><br><span>Because of network effects, they become monopolies very quickly because</span><br>
<span>that’s the logic of the technology. There’s no way to have competing</span><br><span>search engines because people would gravitate to the best one and all</span><br><span>the others would go out of business.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>So with natural monopolies, you have only one course left, and it was</span><br><span>Milton Friedman’s mentor who actually said this. He said, even if you</span><br><span>have free market capitalism, you need to socialize and nationalize the</span><br>
<span>monopoly companies, because otherwise they will steal profits from</span><br><span>smaller businesses and charge them and consumers higher prices, and they</span><br><span>will corrupt market economics from working efficiently, just to their</span><br>
<span>benefit. So even those who truly respect and desire market economics</span><br><span>should want to socialize those larger monopolies that are impossible to</span><br><span>be competitive.</span><br><span></span><br>
<span>- Might that mean nationalizing or socializing Google or Microsoft…?</span><br><span></span><br><span>- Well, that’s the conversation we’ve got to have, ultimately. We can</span><br><span>start now, or we can wait for 20 years and talk about it then, but</span><br>
<span>eventually we’ll have to do something along those lines. If you look at</span><br><span>the 30 most valuable companies in the US today, in terms of their market</span><br><span>value, 12 of them are Internet monopolies; the ones I’ve just named and</span><br>
<span>a few others. They completely dominate the American political economy</span><br><span>(if not the world political economy); they are the vibrant force, such</span><br><span>as it is, of capitalism today. This sort of economic power translates</span><br>
<span>into complete control over the government. In America, we always talk</span><br><span>about the too-big-to-fail banks that got the huge bailout. As senator</span><br><span>Dick Durbin from Illinois said, they frankly own the government. They</span><br>
<span>own Congress, they get their way with whatever they want. Well there are</span><br><span>only two or three of those banks among the 30 largest firms in America,</span><br><span>but there are 12 Internet monopolies. So if we’re serious about</span><br>
<span>addressing monopoly power as a threat to both the economy and to</span><br><span>political democracy, if we’re serious about reinvigorating democracy,</span><br><span>even if one’s a free-market person, then sooner or later we’re going to</span><br>
<span>have to address this issue of monopolies and I would say the sooner we</span><br><span>start having that conversation the better.</span><br><span></span><br><span>- In the case of global monopolies, would that mean looking at the</span><br>
<span>possibility of having global public companies?</span><br><span></span><br><span>- These are really interesting questions, and I think that in America we</span><br><span>haven’t had that debate anyway near enough, because our markets are so</span><br>
<span>enormous and the companies are based here. We think in terms of national</span><br><span>solutions being sufficient, since we have the companies here that we</span><br><span>need to deal with. I think, though, as soon as one crosses the border to</span><br>
<span>any other country in the world, the debate has to change, because then,</span><br><span>clearly, purely national solutions have real limits to them, even in</span><br><span>theory, and international or regional solutions become much more</span><br>
<span>important. But at this point of the discussion I become a student, not a</span><br><span>teacher.</span><br><span></span><br><span>- So, coming back to our starting point, the evolution of the Internet:</span><br><span>between digital utopia or Big Brother nightmare, what’s the present balance?</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>- It’s moving to Big Brother nightmare. Those are loaded words, its</span><br><span>pejorative and you might dismiss what I’m saying with ‘this guy’s a</span><br><span>whacko’. (Those weren’t the terms I picked – I want to make that clear –</span><br>
<span>but at the same time I’m not going to run from them). One of the things</span><br><span>that I came upon when I was doing the research for Digital Disconnect,</span><br><span>that I didn’t fully appreciate just two or three years ago, was the</span><br>
<span>extent to which everything we do online is known to commercial and</span><br><span>government interests. You must start from the assumption that everything</span><br><span>you do is recorded, it’s tapped, it’s monitored and it’s available to</span><br>
<span>some people, somewhere, in some manner. I was shocked by that when I</span><br><span>did the research; but as soon as the book came out, then the Snowden</span><br><span>revelations came out about the NSA and there was a lot more general</span><br>
<span>awareness of this whole process.</span><br><span></span><br><span>But I just had a new shock. The former head of NSA’s surveillance</span><br><span>program has recently left, and he’s done some interviews in which he</span><br>
<span>said that the NSA has access to everything and can track everyone</span><br><span>everywhere globally. They really have that power and they’re using it.</span><br><span>So what do they do now if they want to arrest someone? It’s very easy,</span><br>
<span>they can put together a case on someone (and they can always find a law</span><br><span>you’ve broken somewhere, it seems) and take their illegally gathered</span><br><span>information to the police and say to them, piece together whatever</span><br>
<span>information you said get, come up with legal documentation. Then they</span><br><span>can arrest that person if they want; they have that capacity. As this</span><br><span>former NSA head said, that’s the definition of a police state. Now that</span><br>
<span>might not always be exercised, but it’s that very threat, the very</span><br><span>notion that that’s looming in the background, that creates exactly the</span><br><span>Orwellian world that I don’t think anyone wants to live in.</span><br>
<span></span><br><span>* This article is part of edition No. 494 of ALAI’s (Spanish language)</span><br><span>magazine “América Latina en Movimiento”, special English language</span><br><span>digital edition <a href="http://www.alainet.org/publica/494-en.phtml" target="_blank">http://www.alainet.org/publica/494-en.phtml</a>, titled:</span><br>
<span>“Internet, power and democracy”.</span><br><span></span><br><span>[1] The New Press, New York, 2013.</span><br><span></span><br><span></span><br><span></span><br><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><span></span><br>
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<a href="http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour" target="_blank">http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour</a><br>
<br></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div><b>Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..</b></div><div><br></div>
P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br>
<br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>
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