Corporate Watch: What’s your perspective on the development of the corporate control of the Internet?

Robert McChesney: Well, this goes back to the early ‘90s, when the emergence of the World Wide Web made the Internet appear to be, and have the promise of being, an extraordinarily democratic and interactive medium, whereby people could participate without censor, producing content, distributing it to potentially enormous audiences at very little cost . . . . For a time, we had bookshelves filled with views of the WWW and the Internet as being this new technology that was going to completely undermine the existing communications industries; make them unimportant, because the Internet was going to undercut their semi-monopolistic hold over media and over telecommunications. The most famous piece along these lines was by a technology writer named Steven Levy -- you might have seen it two years ago in the New York Times Magazine -- [that] said all these huge media mergers going on in the world are nothing to worry about because these media giants are basically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and the iceberg they’re going to hit is the Internet with its, as he puts it, billions of channels.

You see a lot less of that talk today. In fact, you see hardly anything like that today, because that vision that Levy had, and that others before him have had, was based on an idea that technologies have superpowers that override social considerations – or a view that the Internet is inherently a thoroughly competitive and democratic mechanism. And in fact, both those views are dead wrong.

…The ideas that Steven Levy wrote two years ago, might as well have been written in the 16^th century, they are so ridiculously out of date. And this is not to say that it’s settled. It’s just to say that with the totally undebated but still quite important policy – that whoever makes the most money wins – you have a situation in which the handful of people who have the most power in the market are dominating the playing field: exactly what you would expect with that policy. That’s the situation we’re in now.

CW: How does the Internet fit into the history of other mass media?

Robert McChesney: The Internet is not a new phenomenon. It’s a different technology from earlier communications media technologies, but there is a history throughout the 20^th century, and probably earlier, of how revolutionary new communication technologies have been developed and eventually deployed. History points to the fact that technologies, while they have tremendous influence and all sorts of effects upon society that are unintended and unanticipated, their fundamental course is determined by how they’re owned and operated. It’s almost an iron law of U.S. communication media, going back to AM radio in the 1920s, that new technologies don’t seem commercially viable at first, so they’re developed by the nonprofit, noncommercial sector, by amateurs. When they develop the technology so you can make money off it, the corporate sector comes in, and through a variety of mechanisms, usually its dominance of politicians, it muscles these other people out of the way and takes it over.

Corporate Watch: There is so little public debate about the use of the medium for public good.

Robert McChesney: There’s no debate about it at all. But the irony of course, is that the Internet only exists because of government subsidizing it for 20 years at taxpayer expense . . . . Taxpayers bankroll these things, develop them, and then once they show a profit, they’re turned over to the corporate sector with nothing in return to speak of. Except the right to be a consumer and make those corporations rich – that’s the great right we have. It’s just simply a scandal; it’s horrendous public policy.

Corporate Watch: What should Internet activists be doing?

Robert McChesney: They’ve got to look at how the Internet’s being developed by the corporate sector. Part of the problem of Internet activists is there’s a romanticization that the Internet is this groovy playpen in cyberspace, divorced from the ugly world of telecommunications, software, media, and industrial capitalism. That’s not the case at all.

…[T]he existing commercial media giants are doing everything in their power to completely colonize the Internet. The ten largest media firms in the world (which account now for about half of the venture capital on the Internet, by the most recent statistics I’ve seen), have TV networks, film studios, record companies, book publishing; and [they see] the Internet [as] part of their empire.

So if we’re thinking in terms of reforming the Internet, we’ve got to see it as part of how we view what is a big democratic media system . . . . If you’re going to get serious about reforming this thing, not just having your groovy website for you and your cool friends to chat with each other off in the margins, but really fight for the heart of the system, which I think we have to fight for, then you’re talking about getting involved, deeply involved, in serious political organizing. Not just some Internet issues, and not just some media and telecom issues, but on broad political issues, because the way we’re going to win this fight is to link issues of Internet reform and media reform with broader social struggles. Things like improving the quality of the standard of living people have in this country, redistributing wealth, undercutting the sheer and total domination of the wealthy and the corporations over our political economy. And when we’ve linked those things together, we’ll have a chance. Until then, we’ll always be in the margins amusing ourselves.