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Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."
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What Big Tech's Monopoly Powers Mean for Our Culture
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squatcho, n.:
The button at the top of a baseball cap.
-- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:25PM
It won't happen, it's impossible. What you saw before was possible because the barriers to entry to a national TV network were extremely high, so there were only 3 of them, and because there was no easily-accessible electronic communications medium, only big players like ABC/CBS/NBC had the ability to transmit communications to people across the country easily every evening. Now, any moron can make a YouTube channel talking about how the Earth is flat or angels are all around us or we had literal giants on Earth a couple millennia ago or somesuch. There's much more democratization, which means the average level of quality is far lower because average Americans are morons, and would rather listen to some wacko spout conspiracy-theory BS than a serious journalist who writes a well-researched but non-sensational piece.