Issues Raised by Having Large Corporate Entities (e.g. AOL/Time Warner) as Providers of Information Resources

 

 

Jim Miller

LSCI 60647

Professor Morris

03/19/01

 

 

            Librarians and future librarians should be aware of the potentials for abuse by large corporate entities who are also information providers.  As more people come to rely on the Internet for information services, these issues are sure to become even more apparent.  In researching this topic there seemed to be a lack of coverage of this issue in the library literature.  Therefore most of my sources will come from a journalism/communications perspective in addition to online activist and news sources.

 

Background and Theory

 

                In an online article dealing with the history of the Internet, several authors who have played important roles in its evolution and development predict what a future Internet might look like:

 

This evolution will bring us new applications –

Internet telephone and, slightly further out,

 Internet television. It is evolving to permit more

 sophisticated forms of pricing and cost recovery,

 a perhaps painful requirement in this commercial

 world. .  . The most pressing question for the

 future of the Internet is not how the technology

 will change, but how the process of change and

 evolution itself will be managed.[0]   

 

The key terms here are Internet television.  Salon, an online news site published an article offered the following quote from Howard Rheingold, Internet pioneer and author of "Virtual Community:"

 

                                                The more the Net becomes like TV, the stupider

                                        we are going to become; the more TV becomes

                                        like the Net, the more intelligent we'll become.

                                        It's the mass media-fication/dumbing down of the

                                        Net; the bigger these enterprises get and the

                                        broader their reach, the less intelligent their

                                        content. The Net used to be a grand alternative to

                                        television, and it still is. But with the expectations

                                        of the mass market, the big center of the curve,

                                        clearly AOL's ambition is to be more and more

                                        like television.[1]

 

The likelihood of the Internet becoming more like or even serving as a medium for television could raise policy issues for libraries.  Some libraries disallow chatting or use of email.  In the future they may need to make decisions on whether to ban or restrict viewing of TV on library computers.  Perhaps they will only allow viewing of educational “shows.”  Networking budgets will also likely require an increase to provide the bandwidth for graphic-intensive traffic generated by this visual media.  The Salon article also brings up the phenomenon of the “dumbing down of the Net.”  The Internet was used originally for research and as a means for university researchers to communicate with researchers at other universities.  John Pavlik, of Columbia University, describes the Internet in its early stages:

 

“The Internet was born officially in 1983, when

 ARPAnet divided into military and civilian

 components, with the civilian component giving

 rise to the Internet . . .For most of its history, the

 Internet was “an underground movement of sorts—

 a cyberspace hangout where researchers, students,

 and techies spent hours tapping into databases and

 discussing the most esoteric of subjects . . . With its

 global popularization and commercialization, the

 Internet has undergone something of a transformation.”[2]   

 

The trend of users coming to the web for entertainment rather than educational purposes will likely contribute through increased demand, to the commercialization (and resulting dumbing down) of the Internet. 

 

The “Dumbing Down” of the Internet: Effects on Libraries

 

            The results of a study published in Library Journal Digital suggest that 75 percent of people who use the Internet also use public libraries.[3]  Having worked in a public library for over three years, I can relay some of the Internet-related reasons why patrons came to the library: to attend workshops on using the Internet, to check out books on the subject of HTML, Java, web site directories, etc., to use online databases exclusively available on-site, to ask reference questions about the Internet, to check email or conduct research on the web, take advantage of fast connection speeds, or to simply learn about the Internet in an educational, social environment.  I saw a tremendous desire for learning with enthusiasm for diverse subject areas in what one could liken to a modern day renaissance.

The prediction has been made that the closer to TV the Internet becomes, the dumber its users will become.  Does this mean that the dumber the population becomes, the more it will come to depend upon the educational resources of libraries?  Or will people prefer to stay in their homes, isolated in the comfort of the limitless entertainment offerings of an interactive televised medium?  These are questions that remain to be answered.

 

Commercialization of the Internet

There is widespread concern expressed over increased commercialization of the Internet. The headline of the January 2000 issue of PC Week, published shortly after the AOL/Time Warner merger, read “AOL’s Buyout of Time Warner Spells the Death of the Internet.”[4]  I found two papers written by students who noticed the transition towards commercialization in 1995[5] and 1996.[6]  It may be beneficial for librarians to understand the history of Internet culture and to recognize that those who used the Internet in its early stages may yearn for that time period of sharing, while viewing the commercialization as a threat to that culture.  Activist sites have been constructed as watchdogs to give voice to those who oppose commercialization.  The Corporate Watch web site warns, "The same gigantic players that control the elder media are planning shortly to absorb the Internet, which could be transformed from a thriving common wilderness into an immeasurable de facto cyberpark for corporate interests . . ."[7] Another freelance writer, Don Monkerud, predicted the merger to be the tip of the iceberg: “The merger of America Online Inc. and Time Warner Inc. is only the first salvo in corporate control of the Internet.”[8]  He went on to state, “Unless these mergers are stopped and the corporations corralled, the promise of the Internet as a democratic forum will die.”  While it is difficult to say if these predictions of corporate control will come true, it is apparent that the Internet is experiencing commercial growth.  An estimated $906.5 million was spent by the Web-based advertising industry in 1997[9], compared to $39 million in 1995.[10]  AOL had about 26 million subscribers as of October 2000, six times the market share of their closest competitor, Earthlink.[11]   AOL currently reports a subscriber base of over 28 million.[12]

Corporate Methods

            The potential for abuse by corporate interests on the web should first be looked at from a broader perspective before being examined for specific instances.  Wilson Dizard, in his book, Old Media New Media, cites economist Robert Reich, who sees a fragmentation of American society: those in the upper fifth who create or otherwise work with information (the affluent,) and those who do not.  He refers to those who make up the top fifth as “symbol analysts” and suggests a grim possibility:

…because of their control over information,

 these symbol analysts are the movers and

 shakers of the country, increasingly isolated

 from the rest of society.  The ultimate scenario

 could be a sort of benign, information-based

 fascism in which the elite have effective control

 of the facts and figures needed to keep order in

 a disintegrating society. [13]

 

How can a corporation control what a population sees?  In one word— portals.  Through the use of portals and browser start pages, a company can provide as the first page users see, only those options they wish the user to see.  Even though consumers may enter a new URL into the browser, they will have for a brief period of time (perhaps subconsciously,) seen the contents of the portal/start page.

            Another way for corporations to control content is through the use of contracts to limit the use of hyperlinks by commercial customers to competing companies’ products.  An example of this concept is outlined in an article from the Washington Post Online:

 

                                                According to people who have reviewed the

 1996 contract, Disney was prohibited from

 creating links within the AOL network to

 outside sites on the Web without AOL's

 written approval. That year, AOL prohibited

 Disney from selling in its online store a set

 of products that AOL sold or might sell,

 including electronic greeting cards, travel and

 leisure reservations, resort and cruise vacation

 packages, audiovisual products, and admissions

 to movies and theme parks.[14] 

 

A growing trend on the Internet is the use of filtering software.  Popular search engine AltaVista provides a “Family Filter” from its start page.[15]  Filtering software from SurfWatch[16] is used to block sites that may be deemed offensive.  It should not be news to those in the library science field that there has been a great debate in libraries across the nation concerning the use of filtering software.  I do not intend to got into this issue in any depth at this time, but would rather raise the possibility for corporate and/or political abuse by ISP’s through the use of filtering software.

            Ranking algorithms may also be constructed to place a competitor’s products lower in a search engine’s results.  The GoTo search service allows company sites to get higher relevance in their search rankings through payment.[17]  This practice is also noted in an article in Reason Magazine:

 

                                    And remember Norman Solomon’s warning that

 “search engine results are increasingly skewed,

 with priority placements greased by behind-the-

scenes fees”?[18]

 

 Worse still, sites with cultural/political views deemed by a corporation as incompatible with their own could be given lower rankings.  Corporations may even buy the rights to content and pull it from public view.  One example is Ted Turner’s decision to ban Speedy Gonzales cartoons from the Cartoon Network, after acquiring exclusive broadcast privileges to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.[19]           

 

 

Clouds on the Horizon

 

            Another trend librarians should watch for is the changing of the web from a seemingly limitless plain of free content to one increasingly dotted with sites charging for what they once provided for free.  One recent article found in a free monthly news publication geared towards those in the computing industry even seems to welcome this trend.[20]  The author cites the cable industry as a model to be used for charging subscribers for content.  This trend, although not limited to large corporations, may catch on in the climate of increased commercialization that corporations provide. 

           

Solutions for the Librarian

 

                It is of the utmost importance that librarians realize these issues exist-- what they choose to do about it secondary.  Corporate influence is already pouring into public libraries in other areas, i.e. outsourcing and increased purchasing of materials through fewer vendors.  Individuals who have grown weary of corporate tampering with search engines have already begun using architectures that bypass traditional methods of online searches with peer-to-peer software such as the now-famous Gnutella (mentioned frequently as a Napster alternative.) 

           

 

 

 

Annotated Bibliography