Distribute and Be Damned 55
in the digital media marketplace is painful, and its consequences for the
production of journalism in particular must, I believe, be challenged –
very simply, distributors are taking too much capital at the expense of
producers in current forms. Yet, the notion that disruption is something
new is a fallacy. In the sphere of the media, disruption has followed
on new technological formats in broadcast and developments in print.
What is new in this iteration is that the profits of media consumption
have transferred to distributors who, in turn, have incredible control
over what information can or cannot be accessed in the new public
sphere. Two are especially important in terms of shaping our modern
lives online: Facebook and Google.
The Distribution Duopoly
Thanks to David Fincher’s 2010 movie, The Social Network, Facebook
probably has the most famous origin story of any tech company, and
the film demonstrated the love affair that many users had with big tech
in the early part of the twenty-first century. Apple (although not Microsoft) had blazed a trail to the notion of tech’s innate coolness, but it
was Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Google that were able to capitalise
most on this public perception. Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg and other students at Harvard, rose quickly over the next
decade to dominate social media and, as we have already seen, was the
largest IPO of its time when the company was listed publicly in 2012.
Google, initially founded as a research project by Larry Page and Sergei
Brin at Stanford in 1996, grew more slowly but achieved dominance of
another market search at the same time that Facebook was beating all
competitors. For Google in particular, its emergence just at that moment
when Microsoft was facing increased attention from the Department of
Justice for potential abuses of its monopoly position meant that the company could grow in a way that was not possible for Netscape, the earliest
Internet-based company that had posed the biggest threat in the mid1990s. This space that the relative withdrawal of Microsoft provided
allowed Google to flourish in ways that would not necessarily have been
possible had it begun life half a decade earlier: Microsoft would almost
certainly have intervened in some shape or form before Google’s IPO in
2004 and it is more than likely that, for the better part of the decade, users could have been googling inside Internet Explorer as the Seattle company’s search engine of choice rather than its later, somewhat unloved
child, Bing. Had Microsoft made a multibillion dollar bid for Google at
the turn of the new century, similar to the $7.5 billion deal by which it
acquired Github, the software development platform, in the summer of
2018, the development of big tech would have been very different.
At its IPO in 2004, Google sold nearly 20 million shares for $1.67
billion, giving it a market capitalisation of $23 billion. A decade later,
in the digital media marketplace is painful, and its consequences for the
production of journalism in particular must, I believe, be challenged –
very simply, distributors are taking too much capital at the expense of
producers in current forms. Yet, the notion that disruption is something
new is a fallacy. In the sphere of the media, disruption has followed
on new technological formats in broadcast and developments in print.
What is new in this iteration is that the profits of media consumption
have transferred to distributors who, in turn, have incredible control
over what information can or cannot be accessed in the new public
sphere. Two are especially important in terms of shaping our modern
lives online: Facebook and Google.
The Distribution Duopoly
Thanks to David Fincher’s 2010 movie, The Social Network, Facebook
probably has the most famous origin story of any tech company, and
the film demonstrated the love affair that many users had with big tech
in the early part of the twenty-first century. Apple (although not Microsoft) had blazed a trail to the notion of tech’s innate coolness, but it
was Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Google that were able to capitalise
most on this public perception. Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg and other students at Harvard, rose quickly over the next
decade to dominate social media and, as we have already seen, was the
largest IPO of its time when the company was listed publicly in 2012.
Google, initially founded as a research project by Larry Page and Sergei
Brin at Stanford in 1996, grew more slowly but achieved dominance of
another market search at the same time that Facebook was beating all
competitors. For Google in particular, its emergence just at that moment
when Microsoft was facing increased attention from the Department of
Justice for potential abuses of its monopoly position meant that the company could grow in a way that was not possible for Netscape, the earliest
Internet-based company that had posed the biggest threat in the mid1990s. This space that the relative withdrawal of Microsoft provided
allowed Google to flourish in ways that would not necessarily have been
possible had it begun life half a decade earlier: Microsoft would almost
certainly have intervened in some shape or form before Google’s IPO in
2004 and it is more than likely that, for the better part of the decade, users could have been googling inside Internet Explorer as the Seattle company’s search engine of choice rather than its later, somewhat unloved
child, Bing. Had Microsoft made a multibillion dollar bid for Google at
the turn of the new century, similar to the $7.5 billion deal by which it
acquired Github, the software development platform, in the summer of
2018, the development of big tech would have been very different.
At its IPO in 2004, Google sold nearly 20 million shares for $1.67
billion, giving it a market capitalisation of $23 billion. A decade later,