Hi Alex, all,

As I explained in my email the connection started from the headline (in the permalink too): "who owns the Internet?". That was verbatim one of the questions we discussed at length in Rome.

It is an important question. It is important to take it literally and figuratively. We can be talking about the actual submarine cables connecting network infrastructures around the world, or we can be talking, for example as in this article, about the dominance of specific Web companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook (I am sending this message via my Gmail account, which is connected to my Humanities Commons profile, which is connected to my Google Drive, which hosts Google docs where I have work in collaboration with colleagues around the world, and datasets, and students courseworks, which is connected to my YouTube profile, and my Picasa pictures, and, and).

"Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic. In his account, the new monopolies are even more powerful than the old ones, which tended to be limited to a single product or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would have been envious of the reach of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos."

I think the whole article should be interesting to those in digital humanities, regardless of their interest in American politics, because it deals with two recent books that are tackling the issue of how Web/digital technologies are shaping culture. There are important parallels to be made, for example, between the monopolistic practices of Amazon, Facebook or Google and the practices of for example Elsevier, or ProQuest:

"Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic. In his account, the new monopolies are even more powerful than the old ones, which tended to be limited to a single product or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would have been envious of the reach of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos."

The pasages referring to piracy, IP and paywalls are also interesting. We can easily replace 'Google' for any other mainstream for-profit academic publisher in the following quote to get an insight into why academic piracy (including illegal self-archiving of academic manuscripts in ResearchGate, Academia and university servers, against academic journals' policies) is not really a major concern for those for-profit academic publishers, because they already profit through other means:

"Google itself doesn’t pirate music; it doesn’t have to. It’s selling the traffic—and, just as significant, the data about the traffic. Like the Koch brothers, Taplin observes, Google is “in the extraction industry.” Its business model is “to extract as much personal data from as many people in the world at the lowest possible price and to resell that data to as many companies as possible at the highest possible price.” And so Google profits from just about everything: cat videos, beheadings, alt-right rants, the Band performing “The Weight” at Woodstock, in 1969."