DailyRadical

video Our Web, Not Theirs

In Who’s Interest is the Internet Being Shaped?


Media power takes on new dimensions as we move into an “always on” digital mediascape, where questions loom concerning not just the media that citizens will consume, but also the digital environment they will consume it in. At this pivotal time the Internet is becoming evermore subjugated to commercial interests of a cartel of domineering big media corporations.


One recent study showed that only 20 domains (websites) capture 39% of all time spent online by US users. Considering that the Internet is technically an open medium, this is an amazingly high level of user concentration. Mysapce.com, which is owned by News Corporation, commands an astounding 11.9% of US users time online. Bearing in mind the USA has well over two hundred million Internet users this kind of concentration of online website usage creates huge vectors of power.


Chief among the online brands are the ever popular social networking website.

In the period between September 2006 to February 2007 the number of visitors to the social networking website Facebook.com jumped 75 percent to 24.8 million worldwide and the number of visitors to MySpace.com grew 26 percent to 98.5 million visitors in the same period. “More than half of all Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 use some online social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook.


Many of the most powerful online media websites are owned by some of the largest media corporations. Fox Interactive Media(NewCorp) spent $580 million to acquire MySpace.com. Google, a large and evermore powerful media corporation, owns one of the most popular blog platforms: BlogSpot.com. Google also purchased Youtube, the most popular online video site on the Internet, for U.S.$1.65 billion. Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL Time Warner own other popular platforms. Googles chief executive officer Eric Schmidt, recently estimated that Google buys start-up web companies every few days, and is quoted saying, “I think the pace [of Google by outs]will accelerate”.