Distribute and Be Damned 63
has shifted between content creators and distributors: having disrupted
the model by which most media had been funded in the twentieth century and, in the process, sucking up nearly all of the revenue attached
to digital advertising, Google and Facebook pose a very real threat to
commercial journalism in its current form.
It should be emphasised that this threat does not lie entirely in the
hands of these two companies. Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund
shares many similarities to the LNP of the BBC which, for very different
reasons, also posed a serious threat to commercial news organisations in
the United Kingdom. Indeed, the very notion of media monopolies was
being warned against by Ben Bagdikian in his influential 1983 book,
The Media Monopoly, and when he updated that title in 2004, he observed that the majority of news production and media entertainment
in the United States was dominated by five groups: Time Warner, The
Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann.
85
Bagdikian, unsurprisingly, failed to see much of the future in that book:
Facebook did not even exist when he revised the title, but he gives no
mention to Google nor Amazon (although Microsoft makes frequent
appearances). What is more astonishing is how completely different the
media landscape looks just 15 years later: all Bagdikian’s corporations
still exist, and are still responsible for much of the content creation in
the USA – it is simply that the real money has shifted to the platforms.
However, it would be entirely foolish to assume that the current state
of affairs is a permanent one. Taplin makes just such an observation
when he remarks that, while writing Move Fast and Break Things, he
had assumed he was living in a period similar to Rockefeller’s complete
domination of the economy via Standard Oil in the 1890s, rather than
1906 when the antitrust case was filed against the company, leading
to its eventual breakup in 1911.
86
Such a breakup looks very unlikely
in the United States – as has been mentioned previously, the big tech
companies have been very effective at enlisting the consumer on their
side via discounted or even free products. Nonetheless, in Europe, such
companies are looking increasingly threatened by legislation and fines
that seek to divert dollars heading into offshore accounts into the coffers
of the EU, an activity that appears to be more likely to be stimulated by
Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda. In any case, all of this ignores
China: in 2010, Google China closed down following the cyberattacks
on its servers as part of Operation Aurora, an extremely sophisticated
attack by hackers with apparent ties to the People’s Liberation Army;
87
Facebook was simply blocked the preceding year under the excuse that
Xinjiang independence activists were using the network.
88
With an estimated 772 million Internet users in 2017, China alone accounted for 20
per cent of the global digital population and, despite all their attempts to
create censorship tools that will be amenable to the Chinese authorities,
both Google and Facebook had utterly failed to make their mark in the
has shifted between content creators and distributors: having disrupted
the model by which most media had been funded in the twentieth century and, in the process, sucking up nearly all of the revenue attached
to digital advertising, Google and Facebook pose a very real threat to
commercial journalism in its current form.
It should be emphasised that this threat does not lie entirely in the
hands of these two companies. Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund
shares many similarities to the LNP of the BBC which, for very different
reasons, also posed a serious threat to commercial news organisations in
the United Kingdom. Indeed, the very notion of media monopolies was
being warned against by Ben Bagdikian in his influential 1983 book,
The Media Monopoly, and when he updated that title in 2004, he observed that the majority of news production and media entertainment
in the United States was dominated by five groups: Time Warner, The
Walt Disney Company, News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann.
85
Bagdikian, unsurprisingly, failed to see much of the future in that book:
Facebook did not even exist when he revised the title, but he gives no
mention to Google nor Amazon (although Microsoft makes frequent
appearances). What is more astonishing is how completely different the
media landscape looks just 15 years later: all Bagdikian’s corporations
still exist, and are still responsible for much of the content creation in
the USA – it is simply that the real money has shifted to the platforms.
However, it would be entirely foolish to assume that the current state
of affairs is a permanent one. Taplin makes just such an observation
when he remarks that, while writing Move Fast and Break Things, he
had assumed he was living in a period similar to Rockefeller’s complete
domination of the economy via Standard Oil in the 1890s, rather than
1906 when the antitrust case was filed against the company, leading
to its eventual breakup in 1911.
86
Such a breakup looks very unlikely
in the United States – as has been mentioned previously, the big tech
companies have been very effective at enlisting the consumer on their
side via discounted or even free products. Nonetheless, in Europe, such
companies are looking increasingly threatened by legislation and fines
that seek to divert dollars heading into offshore accounts into the coffers
of the EU, an activity that appears to be more likely to be stimulated by
Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda. In any case, all of this ignores
China: in 2010, Google China closed down following the cyberattacks
on its servers as part of Operation Aurora, an extremely sophisticated
attack by hackers with apparent ties to the People’s Liberation Army;
87
Facebook was simply blocked the preceding year under the excuse that
Xinjiang independence activists were using the network.
88
With an estimated 772 million Internet users in 2017, China alone accounted for 20
per cent of the global digital population and, despite all their attempts to
create censorship tools that will be amenable to the Chinese authorities,
both Google and Facebook had utterly failed to make their mark in the