Comments On The Comcast/Time Warner Merger Sound A Bit Like Those On The Time Warner/AOL Merger

See The Colonization Of The Internet by Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 25, 2000.

"Although the Internet remains a realm of vibrant dynamism and creativity at its edges, it is being colonized rapidly by huge transnational corporations. That process was accelerated by the Jan. 10 announcement that AOL, the nation's largest Internet company, intended to acquire Time Warner, the world's leading media companies.

"... much of the news coverage focused on the gargantuan scope of the $165 billion transaction [this latest merger is just $45 billion]. And the story of the AOL-Time Warner hookup is newsworthy for that reason alone. It brings together the resources and expertise of a company with global holdings in all aspects of media and entertainment with one that has mastered the newfangled intricacies of the Internet, especially those of on-line commerce--the new Holy Grail."

"The headlong commercialization of the Internet threatens the promise of cyberspace as a leveling medium where even the quirkiest media voices can gain access to the public. If profit-hungry conglomerates become the net's primary gatekeepers, marketing products and services will have a much higher priority than maintaining open roads on the information superhighway. The media's increasing fixation on "e-commerce" reflects corporate America's growing preoccupation with its profit potential. Ominously, the narrowing range of ownership severely threatens the independence of those journalists who work for both the new and old media.

Potential for conflict of interest abounds in a media world in which The Washington Post and Newsweek have joined in "strategic alliances" with NBC, which is owned by General Electric. And when Microsoft Corp., helps pay the salaries of reporters for the all-news cable station MSNBC, or AOL helps capitalize CNN, how well can journalists in their employ report on news that may affect the bottom lines of these far-flung corporations.

Several media watchdog groups have warned that these media megamergers threaten democratic values and freedom of expression since only a handful of corporations are controlling both the content and delivery systems of information.

"The only thing certain at present is that the eventual course of the Internet will be determined by where the most money can be made, regardless of social and political implications," says Robert McChesney, professor of communications at the University of Illinois and author of the book, "Rich Media, Poor Democracy."

The AOL-Time Warner deal also threatens to hurt the struggle for "open-access" policies that would allow competing Internet service providers to offer their services over cable systems' high-speed connections, called "broadband." This method of transmission is as much as 100 times speedier than the fastest modems and can seamlessly deliver all manner of data--including text, audio, photographs, video, film--to various kinds of electronic devices.

Before its marriage to Time Warner, AOL was a leader in the fight for open access to broadband. The giant ISP's 20 million subscribers mostly are limited to the slow speeds and interminable waits that are a part of the Internet experience for modem users. So AOL joined a group called the OpenNet Coalition and fought to guarantee access to cable connections with broadband capacity, most of which are owned by telecommunications giant AT&T.

But with its purchase of Time Warner, the second largest cable operator in the country, AOL gained its own broadband capacity. Media activists are watching closely to see if AOL changes its tune now that it pays the piper.

The Internet is a computer-based system of communication created, nurtured and subsidized by the government for three decades before corporations figured out how to exploit it. American taxpayers provided the venture capital and assumed all the risks of incubation.

Now that the net has proven to be a commercial bonanza, the private sector has moved in with a vengeance and American citizens are left bemoaning the squandered opportunities for true media democracy."

This next excerpt was from PBS NEWSHOUR, Jan. 10, 2000. Excerpt:

"NORMAN SOLOMON: What I make of it is we have a continual mass media discussion, and in the last couple minutes I think have typified it, to discuss what is in it for Time Warner, what’s in it for AOL and relatively little discussion of what’s in it for the public.

I think primarily what’s in it for the public is a narrowing of choices under the illusion of having more diversity. I’m afraid that we may look back on January 2000 as the time when de facto, the World Wide Web became essentially the world narrow Web, which is counterintuitive because there’s all this talk today, all this smoke being blown about how AOL and Time Warner will create these multiplicity of choices through the new media.

The reality is, however, that these new media are being used to herd and goad and leverage the consumers, the media consumers into essentially cul-de-sacs where the links in these various new media are self-referential, not often labeled as such. People are going to be directed to and encouraged to go to various media products on the Internet and elsewhere under the guise of giving them a get deal of choice. I mean, we see that now with the corruption of more and more search engines and portals and so forth where it seems that, for instance, the 22 million people who already access the Internet through AOL in this country, it seems as though, hey, they’re free wheeling through what used to be called the information superhighway, now increasingly in the mass media is simply being looked at as avenues for e-commerce.

So, I think this is a tremendous blow for the potential for democracy in our society through genuine wide-ranging discourse. And we have not only in the newsgathering, news-dissemination business, but as Gerald Levin said a few hours ago, the cutting edge here is what is often called entertainment: And that as well has to do with what people feel their possibilities are. We’re essentially seeing the mass distribution of corporatization of consciousness, and this step today is a big stride down that very slippery and very dangerous road.

RAY SUAREZ: But weren’t these companies that were already doing essentially different things? They’re not apples merging with apples or oranges merging with oranges.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, there are reasons why they’ve merged — because they feel there’s a positive synergy. They can do a gardening process in different parts of the garden that will help each other to grow what they want to grow. And what they want to grow is profits. We heard one of these kingpins in the setup piece a few minutes ago talk about being trustees. Well, they are private trustees. They’re not public trustees. And let’s not forget the Internet was developed through enormous public subsidy, through taxpayer dollars. And yet now we’re in a situation where these mergers are being greeted with exclamations of, if not surprise, then at least, “Wow, this is amazing; this is humongous, $350 billion.”

But the very mass media they’re increasingly corporatized are not asking the fundamental questions about these mergers. And I think people who are sitting at home contemplating what this really portends need to look at demanding and need, in fact, to demand antitrust action because in lieu of that, this is going to be looked at as a horrendous, perhaps irreversible step, towards the concentration of media control in very, very few hands."