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AOL Nation
The first media call came in at 7 a.m., a producer at ABC Radio News waking me up to ask if I had any thoughts about the announcement that Time Warner and America Online had just decided to merge into a $350 billion company. The second call came from the BBC, then the Associated Press.
The fourth was from a Boston Globe reporter asking if I could comment on IBM's announcement that it was taking major steps to make Linux a centerpiece of its computer hardware strategy, the biggest embrace yet of Open Source by a major computer maker.
The juxtaposition of the two announcements was almost Biblical in its symbolism and significance:
If Microsoft turns out to be guilty of anti-trust violations for seeking to dominate the Web browser market and discouraging innovation and competition, then the Time-Warner-AOL merger seems dramatically more serious in its potential consequences, not only for consumers but for a competitive new media environment. In fact, the accusations against Microsoft seem trivial when weighed against the impact of the mega-merger announced yesterday.
The cornerstone of anti-trust law -- and the idea behind a free press -- is that the individual citizen/consumer benefits from openness, choice and diversity of expression and opinion. The impact of mergers like this is to deny choice, concentrate power and homogenize creativity and expression. Many of us are free marketers here, and we like the booming global economy. But there are limits. Steve Case and Gerald Levin have broached them. At some point, Americans have to decide if they still want a free information culture, along with a functioning government. Or not.
AOL and Time-Warner wouldn't just be creating another media company, but an information nation. This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth. Time-Warner/AOL would become the largest media "content provider" on the planet, a hybrid conglomerate ranging from movies to magazines to messaging and conferencing systems to online services to cable systems linking AOL's (and Compuserve's) 20 million subscribers. This would create the world's largest media platform for the purpose of what drooling Wall Street analysts like to describe as "cross-fertilization with content." For anyone who doesn't know what that means, the translation is simple: monopolize both content and the means to transmit it.
The move represents the most sweeping move yet by corporate conglomerates to control high-speed access to the Internet and to dominate its content. Ironically, it threatens to further pressure Microsoft, whose bumbling efforts to expand into new media now appear even more short-sighted and poorly-timed.
If the AOL/Time-Warner merger is permitted, according to Scott Ehrens, one of Wall Street's most respected media analysts, it will represent "an unprecedented powerhouse. If their mantra is content, this alliance is unbeatable."
The AOL/Time-Warner mantra is, in fact, content, along with delivery. But it isn't as clear whether it's unbeatable. If the IBM/Linux move hadn't been announced on the same day, yesterday would have gone down in history as one of the Net's darkest.
But IBM's decision to Linux-enable its computers might mark an even more significant shift in the technology world. IBM's embrace of open source underscores the fact that Linux is no longer a fringe technology. The age of proprietorship may have ended yesterday, as a hoary corporation appeared to emerge Godzilla-style from the muck.
The significance of IBM's move was that the next generation of e-business will expect increasingly open standards for inter-operability across a wide variety of computer platforms. A movement that began as a counter-cultural, individualistic effort to keep the Net free from the very kind of corporatist control the AOL/Time-Warner merger typifies has broadened into a growing standard for commercial as well as individual computer use.
Linux has, in effect, ensured that at least a significant portion of the Net will have an option to remain free of the kind of corporate control AOL and Time Warner each embodied separately, let along together. (If there were ever two companies that deserved to eat one another alive, it's these two. It's hard to say which is greedier, blander, or less committed to any ethos beyond information as a cash commodity.)
The AOL/Time-Warner merger is chilling. This is a new kind of nation the world doesn't need. The merger needs to be carefully scrutinized, and hopefully stopped. The company would be far too big and powerful to exert a healthy influence on media, entertainment, or on the Internet. If corporations and their lobbyists weren't the largest contributors to the American political process, members of Congress would be clamoring for hearings on the acquisition of the American media, new and old, by a handful of obscenely large and powerful businesses.
The libertarian ethos of the Net resists government control or oversight, but that philosophy will be sorely tested by mergers like this one, which could make many nostalgic for the old Microsoft. The corporate move to acquire information, online and off, is a civic and an Internet menace. There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore. Time-Warner, Disney, GE, News America, Microsoft and Westinghouse have devoured too many of the country's most powerful media organizations.
The United States may have been the birthplace of a free and independent press, but its contemporary mass media are, increasingly, disgraceful testaments to mega-marketing: sensationalized promoters of controversy and fragmentation, producers of tepid, homogenized information-peddling.
By comparison, the Net, increasingly the subject of commercial and corporate interest and speculation, has remained strikingly free, diverse and outspoken. One of the most substantial threats online, the growing dominance of Microsoft, was blunted by the open source movement, government intervention, and the company's own uncertainty and lack of real creativity.
As of this week, individuals, people who believe in free and diverse speech, those who believe in the free distribution of information and unrestricted navigation of the Net, have a new and potentially much more menacing opponent than Microsoft ever was. To a chorus of breathless business reporters and joyous Wall Street analysts, Steve Case declared he was launching "an Internet Revolution." That's a pretty fancy term for unprecedented greed and power.
Case managed to make Bill Gates appear humble.For all that Gates is routinely portrayed as a Millenial genius, neither he nor his company was ever that grasping, or particularly creative when it came to creating content or expanding into new forms of media. Ultimately, despite much-publicized ventures from the online magazine Slate to MSNBC, Microsoft has not been able to successfully move beyond software and services.
Companies like AOL-Time/Warner will seek to dominate the Net just as other companies increasingly bulldoze over other parts of American business and cultural life, from music and filmaking to retailing and even coffee shops. Wal-Mart, Blockbuster Video, Staples, Toys R Us, Starbucks, Disney and now, AOL/Time-Warner, rule our world.
No, I do not, for the simple reason that this (and other) mergers expose the instability inherent in the system. a social structure such as capitalism, predicated on the individuals or agents desire to accumulate will eventually display this (or some other) concentrating effect. Katz's point of libertarian opposition to this wealth concentration is precisely the point: libertarianism isn't about unchecked _government_ power, it's about any unchecked power, which AOL Nation is. as pointed out, the open-source movement is more in line with Katz's libertarian ideas: people are free to associate and contribute to a product; those contributors, then, may decide to let themselves or anyone use it. however, they do not seduce (using advertising) others into using or contributing to it, an ugly seduction filling our world. the ability to create and deliver this seduction is power; concentrating this power is anathema to libertarian ideals.
Thinking about what you've been saying about the interrelationship btw. the mass media corporations and the gov. referring to the falklands war and Thatcher elections, think of the Gulf war and Bush (media war). On the other hand think of the limited reporting on issues that the gov. are not so fond of being seen but most of their voters.
Huge media monopolies are granted if they can and will support the party in power creating public opinion in favour of the party itself. In this case the media monopoly is controlled by the gov. to swing the mood of the public, but thats what they are payed for.
If you really care for independant opinion, read the information sources provided by both opposing parties / countries and listen out for fact. Just don't ever expect to optain untainted information from only one source!
It is also an accurate summary of the political views of Ayn Rand, who is big among nerds, so I doubt if it was necessarily a troll at all.
:-)
On the other hand, the fact that its author claimed credit for it on "trolltalk" within minutes of its posting, suggests I may be wrong
having not read the entire thing, but merely the snippet offered in a previous post, i think greenspan makes a nice case against capitalism: he claims we shouldn't have anti-trust since the government limitations of "too much competition," i.e. monopolist practices, aren't in the spirit of the guiding principle: _competition_. exactly! since we don't like the outcome of this guiding principle, we shouldn't use it: its ends are not very good and its means aren't intrinsically worthwhile, so one ought to look to other guiding principles.
I appreciate your sentiments here, and I don't want to downplay the threat of corporate imperialism, but nothing, repeat nothing is worse than fascism. To clarify; Fascism is a mass movement that draws its base from the most disaffected layers of humanity. Its historical purpose is the smashing of the organised working class. All other organised resistance or sources potential resistance are also physically smashed. Mussolini's seizure of power is one example, and Hitler's early rhetoric was almost entirely anti-socialist. It was this that attracted big business funding for both of them. The ruling classes are reluctant to use Fascism because it is a two-edged weapon. Also it's far better to rule without seeming to. But it remains their ultimate weapon. The real point of this posting is that with the very real growth of fascist and neo-nazi parties in the West - particularly some European countries - it is vitally important that the word 'fascism' is not loosely used, but instead clearly understood the better to resist it.
Yeah, I read a report in the local rag (the Sydney Morning Herald), where the writer logged onto AOL & asked what people think of the merger, when he was promptly told that its not permited to discuss those issues on AOL.
Well couldnt they at least have waited till the Microsoft trial was over, before they went to bed together. This is really going to make things easier for MS now they have such 'big competition'.
...and you forgot that in other countries (yes there are others, try to remember *g*) aol is way smaller!
AOL users are sheep.
Netscape/AOL products have always sucked.
I will leave RoadRunner if AOL starts to influence it.
And Cub and Rainbow Foods is in Minneapolis/St Paul
Hmmm, As I recall, AOL was in a lawsuit to try to force the cable companies to allow other ISPs access to their cable. That must have looked like a good idea at the time, but could backfire now that AOL/TW owns some of the wires!
>All (media, government, law enforcement, >corporations) are motivated by one thing: greed. >There are more officers sitting in speed traps to >punish Joe Q. Motorist for going 10 miles above >the speed limit than there are rooting out the >drug dealers, terrorists, and serial killers that >are causing REAL
That has got to be the single most stupid statement I've seen posted so far on this topic. What, do you think the police get to keep the money from the tickets they issue, or do they just take bribes? The fact is, over 40,000 people are killed in auto accidents every year, far more than the number of people killed or injured in drug-trafficking, terrorist, or serial murderer related activities. And the root cause behind these deaths is speeding, reckless driving, road rage, and drunken driving.
It's obvious that you must have been recently tickted for speeding, and are still simmering. Here's some advice. Get over it!
Stockholders.
In the UK we're quite used to the idea that most of our media is controlled by one person, let alone one company. With Sky TV, Fox and the most popular tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, Murdoch tells us what to think every day. One of the greatest things about the Internet appears to be the impossibility of monopoly control of content. While MS tried to control the platform even they couldn't have controlled the content. Time/AOL will provide massive content and the delivery systems, but I can't see them haing a monopoly on content, or am I missing something?
Yeah, it is pretty funny. Especially when they have that I'm smarter than you first post morons attitude...
And when they say how fascinating it is that we're such morons...
I don't want to blow your bubble or something, but the core problem is copyrights, and this mega-merger that's going to screw the public is just a symptom.
Uhh. Except CNN, which is available in some way or another (CNN claims) to 1 billion people.
Oh, sorry, that must not count - you were just talking about AOL and Warner. Right. Not Time. Well, I'll just keep my mouth shut, then.
I see it as just a huge ISP company joining a huge media company... no big deal there, but is it ME who still gets to decide how do I view their content, or whether to view it or not... after all, there's still a lot of other media companies, in the US and around the world. *** This is ultimately true. We have freedom of choice. Remember, the net is, again, that which makes this possible. Unless you get your content through a TW cable franchise. *** If the merger is approved, locales with only TW cable franchises will be opened up to competition. A benefit to the consumers.
Microsoft still has more power. It doesn't matter what you put on tv when someone else controls the remote.
It used to be Communism we feared, now it is this.
Are you using Netscape as your browser?
If you are, you're already a happy-shiny AOL user, and have been for some time now.
Deal with it.
If this sort of thing keeps up we'll have to go back to things like UUCP and Fidonet if we want truly liberated transport. Or, *gasp*, hand-delivered disks!
the roadrunner service is owned by time warner and i currently use it. I would hate to have to go back to dialup because aol took over.
Slashdot has always had some of the most biased "news" ever. It's not hard to read past the bias, though. MSNBC, by comparison, has posted stories that cast microsoft in a less than complimentary light at times.
But forget about that. You're saying a COLUMN shouldn't be biased. That's just idiotic. Of course a column is biased, Jon Katz is just posting his horribly misguided opinion -- OH WWAIT WAIT, I'M BEING BIASED..
dolts.
>If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running the world?
Nothing. Except, of course, the fact that if said corporations were not providing the best value, the market will adjust. The only thing the government should do is ensure that companies are not using coercion, bribery, etc. to unfairly prevent competition. Anything else will ultimately be self-correcting.
>I think our government has been moving twords the Libetarian ideal for a number of years now anyway, with deregulation.
I would dispute this assertion on any number of grounds, but keep in mind the "deregulation" as defined by the USG is merely loosening some mandates around the edges. Even "deregulated" industries are still heavily regulated and controlled.
>But look at the telecom industry, competition is decreasing, not increasing, and the industry is consolidating.
The baby bells are combining, but new players (cable telephony, internet telephony, wireless, satellite) are slowly emerging. It is a big, complex system that takes time to change.
>Even in markets that have been opened up to competitors (such as mine) for the baby bells, not much has changed, DSL access is still spotty, etc.
Again, it is a big, complex system. The new players are not yet offering a compelling choice to the residential consumer. Businesses are another matter and change is beginning to take place. As for DSL, it is not a compelling cost/benefit to enough people yet. If everyone in an area were demanding DSL access at the profit level the providers want, then it would be in place yesterday. The demand is simply not there, no matter what us techies want to think.
Liberal, Conservative, what's the diff? You Americans crack me up sometimes believing that your version of "Liberal" is left wing. "What? They're _talking_ about reforming the health care system instead of cutting taxes... fucking Commies!"
Or perhaps it's because it has been proven the most reporters vote liberaly.
>If we really did have zero government
>control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug
>fest with the result being a few corporations
>basically owning and/or running the world?
How about 10 million people running an operating system developed by a 21-year-old Finnish college student? Microsoft and Apple weren't keeping enough people happy, and now Linux has set Wall Street records-- a shining example of the free market doing better than government regulation would have.
If the government had involved themselves earlier, it could have killed Linux. Why? Because they would have forced MS to lower prices (or raise them, depending on which part of Judge Jackson's findings of fact you read!)-- a major griping point for a lot of people that switch to Linux! If Windows were forced to drop their price to 1/2 of what it was before, fewer people would have been tempted to switch to Linux.
Listen, if two or three companies wind up being the only game in town, then they have to be doing well enough to keep customers happy. If they aren't, then along comes something like Linux that blows them out of the water-- better, cheaper, faster, or any combination of the above. Otherwise, the companies are doing a good enough job to keep people satisfied. As for those who aren't satisfied: tough noogies. If you're that upset, start your own company.
The fact of the matter is, the anti-trust lawsuit is partially aimed at making Microsoft give customers what they want (customers includes OEMs that wanted to bundle Windows). THIS IS WILL ONLY HELP MS! Microsoft has pissed off people because they didn't deliver what people wanted-- fully documented API's, stability, good pricing, adherence to standards, etc. The best way to kill Microsoft is to let it piss of the rest of its customers and get them to switch to Linux/BSD/BeOS/SCO/whatever. Instead, Microsoft will be forced to deliver on its promises and make its customers happy-- which will only serve to make Microsoft popular again...
And, yes, I know: Microsoft also acted in an "anti-competitive" manner. So MS is like a schoolyard bully. If the kids cooperated, they could knock the shit out of Microsoft together (ostensibly by switching all support away from Windows) and teach Microsoft a lesson. But instead, they were loud-mouthed crybabies that went screaming to the teacher. Now he (Microsoft) is being forced to stay after school and study for half an hour-- which winds up helping him get an A+ on his next test. Personally, I would rather see the playground justice. Fucking crybabies...
Ah, the typical 'cynical' responses of the Slashdork illuminati, who of course know SO much better than anyone else. Hey Rob, why not create a filter that filters out all the "Jon Katz is an idiot" posts? It just might help the signal/noise ratio a small amount.
A little history about AOL for the Slashdorks: Please read over www.aolsucks.org. No really, read it. You'll see a little window into a company that considers the word 'breast' obscene, even in chat groups about maternity and child care. You'll see a company that arbitrarily censors whomever while waving around a draconian TOS backed up by an unpublished 'dirty words' list. You'll see the abuse of moderators, and even threats to shut down criticism of AOL being done on NON AOL SERVERS.
And THIS is just the AOL of 1995-1996. THIS is just AOL when we were all laughing at them for their broken news readers and mail readers. Now, just TRY for a moment to expand this little picture over the monster created by AOL/Time-Warner. NOW can you see why this is a HUGELY BAD THING? How about large-scale censorship? Steve Case is a control freak...don't think for a minute that he won't expand his disturbing vision of an online 'community' into the media monster of Time Warner. God help us if AOL's accounting dep't takes over Time Warner ventures...
Ah but this is slashdot...if(article.Author == "John Katz") { fprintf(stdflame, "Jon Katz is an idiot!\n" };
HERE HERE!
To both.
AOL has a incredibly long history of ripping of customers and using buisness practices so devious, it makes microsoft come off like a young virgin bride.
Time Warner makes AOL look like the aformentioned YVB.
This is SCARY NEWS, folks.
I assume that the British versions of the SUN and the TIMES were being referred to.
The British SUN is a right-wing tabloid that has a topless woman on page 3 everyday. Somehow the "family-values" thing got lost on them when it comes to getting their 3 million daily sales.
The British "TIMES" is a so-called-respectable newspaper, whose sunday issue is filled with royal-gossip and "this weeks 3rd world disaster" stories. Its foreign news coverage prompted a book called "Small Earthquake in Chile, Not Many Dead" named after an infamous headline. I hear that that book was an interesting exploration of the British press's attitude towards the non-european, non-north-american world.
Borg say - Resistance,
it is futile. You will be,
Assimilated.
Your giving the average consumer too much credit. The average aol user is not that hip, and they will not even know that they are being subjected to the control of Big Brother. Don't assume that the average schmoe has a clue just because you do. ***Free Frank Rizzo from oppression***
therein lies the problem
I won't say much about the strengths of M$'s products, but then I dont think much of the strength of AOL's either.
M$ does enormous amounts of marketing and PR
M$ lives on its brand name (it rode IBM's coattails initially but we've all heard the "you don't get fired for buying M$" line)
M$ gives away MSIE
M$'s never stopped diddling with the software t
M$'s never stopped adding flash and glitz (i may concede the "easier" bit)
People are not forced to use M$
Any person with half a brain can find better cheaper software
M$ has played about as fair as any megacorp does
So What's Your Point?
Considering that Margaret Thatcher's leadership was a disaster for the UK political system (spot the difference between her policies and the policies of the current, supposedly different, government), I think that he/she has a point.
I always find it one of the richest jokes when I read something like this. You chastise Katz because he thinks "he knows it all". You, of course, know the Real Truth(tm). I keep waiting to see the face of someone who finally realizes the joke. Only people like you never do. Stickboy
Although the rest of us are whole heartedly exited about this stake of our freedom and expression of speech, my amazment does not exceed my wonderment concerning the fact that within the next few years our choices in air my be examined in the near future. As for who will monopolize the worlds trades and who holds the biggest cookie jar, is byond me, as long as the passion of men's greed are involved, there can only remain hope, unless Time Warner\AOL merges with PANDORAS BOX INC. . Fight is a futile word in a society which continuously take a spectators position of things. Speak of freedom, you lose (Or should I say lost it?) it, the act of protections of "Rights" are one thing, but the privlige of "Rights" remain ignored. Pathetic actions, equal pathetic outcomes, to be heard one must speak in unison; who is the first to speak? There must be a voice, strong and clear with more than intent, but action, boycott has been one way, but for a whole net? Perhaps for every site who belives in the true enterprise of free persons we should dedicate a small piece of the site to our statement of rebellion towards such ideals to be forced upon us. The time is growing short, the voices drown in a flood of merging waters.
Probably because TV is as dead as commercial radio. Who cares. Anyone with more than a dozen synapsii firing doesn't even own a tv.
Everytime I hear about one of these huge mergers it makes me think about how much less important each of us are becoming. What if one of these companies does something that hurts the average consumer, we have no power to retaliate. No boycott or story about their actions can stimulate enough public angst against a company that controls business in almost every sector. The potential here is that we are now just consumers that will be force fed more AOL cd roms. Even if we dont want to support that part of the business, everytime you turn on CNN or one of the other numerous channels now controlled by them you are still indirectly supporting the business. With companies this huge, the dream of owning your own business is becoming less and less achievable. Sad times are these.
Jon Katz is a stupid fuck
For example, through-out the 1999 year, IBM has ignored the LGPL requirements when statically linking against the Linux Libc. To date, IBM has yet honor a request to release the object files for ADSM v3r1 Level 0.1 for Linux as required by their use of statically linking against the LGPL Libc. International Business Machines' supposed statement of "commitment" to Linux is something the Linux community needs to fight against. It is unfair to the Linux community for IBM to place a statement of commitment to extending support to Linux/Open Source and then not honor a classic open source license and continue to ship software for Linux with a statement of non-support.
IBM's attempt to cash-in on Linux will cost the reputation of Linux in the end. I rather see legitament efforts to support Linux slowly find their way into business rather than companies buying into big name "support" to only find the support statement issued by IBM PR means nothing in actuality.
Please email lockdown34@hotmail.com to get more information on how to join the protest against IBM's continued business practice of ignoring LGPL requirements.
This should be moderated up. That's the best and wisest statement that I've seen on an otherwise abysmal thread.
**********************************
Of course we'll survive this one! Without people to subjagate, what is the point of controlling the flow of information?
Really tho, you don't need to stop it. Just side-step it and go about your business. Raid your mom's pocketbook and go buy the new Misfits box set or something.
The scary part is what could happen once all the competition is eliminated, which WILL happen, because the small ISPs will not be able to build their own cable networks or buy out TW/AOL.
Funny, I thought that the only thing you Americans worshipped was money, and to quote from the big J himself "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven". Perhaps your country should be known as the Divided Hypocrites of America. Love thy neighbour, so long as he is of Northern European extraction, and has been to Harvard/Princeton.
What tactics are those? I am inclined to agree with the original poster. Most hatred for AOL is unfounded. I look at my parents and AOL is the only way they can get on the NET with confidence.
I know what you mean Talon, I went with RR for my lan because it was faster that a T-1 I got it cheap about $40 a month, No connection time outs, no Junk mail, I can Run my own email server and small web server and share my high badwith conncetion with my lan. Now With the merger I'm seeing AOL take over and changeing everything. I can only hope Americast gets their Cable modem provider up and running and stable soon.
I left aol a good while back because I cant stand Ad's Playing by their Timers and their restrictions and force feeding me ad's for the price I was paying. The gave out my info to all. (That way I could count on at least 40 peices of junk mail per day) Their content stinks, and they dumb down everything. I was talking to one woman sho said she had been online for 3 years. I asked her about IRC and newsgroups. She gave me a clueless look, and told me she knew what she was doing. (aol at work)
I agree with katz on this one. To let these folks have access to High Bandwith is a nightmaire to me. I choose my news sources. I'm on warner because of the high speed access, and My sci fi channel. If they come and force me to use their accursid AOL interface, that dooms me and my network. Thoes folks useing linux wont have a chance, because theirs no aol client for linux.
What makes it worse.. Their also talking about a WebTV style cable box. Its just what I need, Watching Matrix and I hear "You've got mail" or some moron IM'ing me with a "1-900" number.
I can only hope Americast can get their but moving on this one, As soon as it comes out and gets stable, I'm running from AOL - Time Warner
Its bad enough I have ICQ and Winamp that belong to them, but NOT my ISP, I'll go to MSN first! yes i feel that strongly about this.
Errr... Europe was the birthplace of the free press. I know you Yanks like to pretend that history started in 1789, but governments were being criticized in Europe while your ancestors were busy oppressing the indigenous population. Europe (with the dishonourable corporate-loving exception of the UK) still has an extremely free press, and a set of laws that prevent the over-domination of undemocratic, faceless megacorps. Land of the Free my a**e.
russ,
AOL has NOT done a better job than anyone else at getting people on the net. The problem is that people in general can't deal with computers, and AOL has provided an "idiot friendly" interface that requires little to no thought. I mean, what other company has millions of users that will use a product (AIM) with a KNOWN security hole (a buffer overrun) being exploited on their machine BY the company to stifle competition by keeping their service from interacting with other IM solutions from various companies.
"few wealthy individuals with no respect for the common man." class envy run rampant... and as for the common man, well the common man is...common.
That was close Trollmastah...
Good song though!
" AOL coupled wiht Time / Warner will not only control what half the internets population sees"
Guess I'm in the other half. And no I don't care what AOLers see! AOL was, is, and probably always will be the joke of the entire Internet. So now they got a little content, and access to a fast last mile? They still gonna be lag dogs. Bwahaha! AOL lusers. All this is gonna mean is more advertising shoved down their braindead throats. Who can still remember that one ad campaign they ran a while back? "I can't tie my own shoes but I can get online with AOL!" ROFLMAO I guess their present advertising isn't much different, "Now easier than ever!" So even bigger lusers can use our service. I don't see how controlling the minds of these sheep can be of any consequence. AOLers are hardwired not to matter. All AOL and Time Warner are gonna control are millions of mindless drones, that don't matter anyways.
Of course a monopoly is not a problem for the economy. It's a problem for the consumers, you, me, everybody who has to give their money away to stay alive!!
oh yeah, forgot...
Mcdougal the llama
Russia hasn't been communist for about 13 years now, pea-brain. In fact Russia has a lot in common with the USA these days, rampant crime, too many poor people and a corrupt political system controlled by a few wealthy individuals with no respect for the common man.
Check out the writings of Noam Chomsky (nasty Jewish intellectual) and John Pilger (descendant of English criminals), to find out the real truth in today's media and what has been ignored in the pursuit of the 'free' market.
Apparently because he has opinions which draw a lot of discussion?
How long will it be before AOL Time Warner starts buying other companies? Perhaps they will start by purchasing CNN and NBC... Perhaps they will buy Red Hat and Corel. Hm, then things will be more interesting...
Anyone still want Microsoft broken up? That way they'll be easier to purchase, right?
Except that being unemployed in France doesn't mean that you have to rely on the Red Cross in order to eat. Just as a matter of interest, the most capitalistic and American ass-kissing country in Europe, the UK, is only slightly richer than Turkey, whereas one of the most socialistic, Luxembourg, is the richest (per head) country in the world. Bollocks to brainless capitalism.
From what I hear, mass layoffs and company morale hitting an all time low.
What a load of elephant-turds. If you run a KDE app via the console, you get a lot of informative messages in the event that there is a problem, whereas if you run a Windows app from the DOS window you get nothing at all. A GUI is not a bad thing all the time, and at least with Linux you have a choice of one or the other. And just to make a point, my dad (55 this year) has been using Win95/98 for 3 years and ignored my suggestion that he might like to try Linux for a while. Well, he shocked me stupid(er) by saying "What's this Linux like, I'm sick of Windows crashing on me".
This argument doesn't have much to do with end users. It has a lot to do with competetors, however.
Microsoft blocked competitors out of the market by various methods, both legal and illegal.
AOL-TW, on the other hand, will just provide a fast service and lots of content. They will not create standards than can only be accessed if you use their software, etc.
So if you look at the consumer side, both MS and AOL-TW have played pretty fairly, but if you look at the competitor side, MS has caused trouble while AOL-TW will not.
Communism does not allow for any private ownership, and yet many businesses in China are in private hands. The kind of economy where the government controls a large part of the economy, but still encourages private enterprise is called fascism, but fascism is associated with racism, so we'll carry on pretending that China is communist.
20% unemployment? It would be just like living in France or any other socialistic European country...
The annoying little thing you're talking about is SmartDownload. That is an add-on to Netscape's browser it isn't a standard feature. If you don't like it you don't have to use it, or you could go use a competing product like Gozilla.
I totally agree. I'll take MS over the AOL crap any day now. And people who will argue that AOL now has Netscape, please remember that all the good NS engineers have already left!
Drop the chalupa, man.
Now, they'll still be alive as cable and DSL take over.
But, they still have to compete with DSL, which will work better, and perhaps cheaper, than cable internet access.
Today's modem-based ISPs will be completely unable to compete with Time Warner and its cable modems, and DSLs are way too expensive to consider as an alternative to cable, so Time Warner is going to have a monopoly over Net access one day. This happens whether or not the merger with AOL happens.
(1) Time Warner is not the only cable provider in the US that offers cable modem service.
(2) DSL is becoming more competitive all the time and is not that far behind cable modem technology. Especially, given that because of the "shared" nature of cable modem bandwidth, the individual's bandwidth will go down as the number of cable modem subscribers increases.
(3) Wireless solutions also exist in some areas (i.e. Phoenix), these provide additional competition.
(4) While cable access is widespread in urban areas, many rural areas across the US have no cable access. Even small cities (100,000) often have limitted cable service, which is not likely to provide cable modem capabilities. While these areas are small individually, when combined they account for up to 20% of the potential US internet market, which is locked-out of cable modem service. These households will provide at least some market for phone-line and wireless based solutions.
> most of them cannot speak an entire sentence correctly
Hmmm, it's obvious that you don't have that problem...
TW/AOL WILL eventually eliminate all competition, because in most areas, they will be the only ones with the cable lines. Nobody's going to pay to connect at 56K anymore, so all the ISPs that rely on modems will be put out of business, leaving no choice. After that, TW/AOL can do whatever they want, including banning Linux and providing generally crappy service. Things that are only in demand by geeks, like static IP addresses and being allowed to run servers, will be things of the past, and there will be no alternative to TW/AOL that caters to people who want to run servers on static IP addresses.
Yes, but a lot of consumers are denied a decent choice while the market finds a way around a bad monolithic organisation. IBM's control removed superior alternatives, and following in their footsteps, so have Microsoft.
Lets see..... In a major US metropolitan area that: Less than 5% qualify for xDSL, Less than 1% qualify for cable TV from USWest (VDSL), Less than 20% quailfy for cable modem from Cox Communication, and who knows what percentage can't get above 28.8k because of US West's shortsighted-ness in the cabling department, I don't see the analog ISP's hurting for business.
By adding AOL to the picture, they can now make your default startup webpage have CNN news on it. So the person who wants to read their news on the net no longer has to take the time to find it (and possibly find it from a different source than CNN) they get it instantly. Or perhaps they will add a pointcast news app to your desktop that streams CNN stories to you so that you no longer need to even open your web browser (nor think) anymore. Sure you could take the time to find other sources for news, but the newbie internet user may not know this (not everyone knows how the WWW works), and others may not bother (reading the news on coffee break, etc). My mother, for example, has no concept of what a search engine is... believe it or not, most of the population is not as "internet savvy" as the average /. user, and this is why having one company control cable TV and the Internet is dangerous.
Sorry, what I meant was having one company control the content of most of the news on cable TV _and_ control how many people access the Internet (and what they see on it) is dangerous.
'The schools have plenty of money'? Hmm. Interesting.
You know, the day that the average public school teacher's salary is equal to the average corporate middle manager's salary is probably the day that I agree that the schools have plenty of money. Until then...
you haven't redone "karma-chameleon" yet have you? If so is there a link to the article handy?
A guerrilla-type grassroots high-speed wireless network, open for everyone, which would work without the intervention of governments, telecom operators and the like
A bunch of innovative and independent content creators who don't give a f#ck about selling their soul for money
To educate the masses that there really is more to life than being just a temporary storage for money transferred from their employers to some other company
I personally try to kick the existing power structure's butt whenever I can by not complying with their ideas of consumer behaviour patterns and the like.
To start, get Junkbuster or Webwasher to remove some dirt from your eyes.
AOL/TW will cater to their focus group definition of 'mainstream' entertainment, for sure, but there will be alternative content as there is now, for anyone who wishes to find it. TW would never have sanctioned say, "The Blair Witch Project," for example. Perhaps this AOL/TW mammoth will somehow cause a rise in incredibly creative content developed by folks outside the AOL/TW envelope. I think the threat of an AOL/TW 'spam machine' and a 'selective entry' gateway is real though. Both companies got where they are today NOT by giving away things for free; They might try a 'class of service' gateway that charges more for outside their domain internet access, or might offer slower access except to their own offerings, but charge more for high performance access outside their domains. So, I think their business model speaks for itself: charge for everything and try to restrict access and stop leakage in or out. If you want to see an example of content control call your local TW outlet and ask them to put BBC radio back on cable. Imagine if this new company decides to select which domains get through their system [and with what data rate].
No, that would only be the case if Case had liberal leanings.
Didn't anyone ever tell you that the reason you think we have a liberal media is because that's what the conservatives are telling you?
It's all well and good to prattle on about "vertical" and "horizontal" monopolies as if those terms had any practical meaning, but you're missing the real issue here. The issue here is not monopolies. The issue here is the corporations that will control our lives in the future. Now there is certainly nothing wrong with corporations controlling our lives; this is what capitalism is all about. But some corporations are downright dangerous. Take AOL and Time-Warner as examples.
AOL in particular is disturbing. By acquiring and thus aligning themselves with Netscape Corporation, they have essentially committed an open defiance of Microsoft. I know that many Slashdot readers don't like Microsoft and get some sort of childish, psychosexual "kick" from defying Microsoft, but nearly every economist and software professional in this country has agreed that actions taken against Microsoft should probably not be allowed. At the very least, lashing out at Microsoft is anti-capitalist. Now I'm not naive; I know that the liberals despise capitalism and everything that it stands for. But we have a novel opportunity here to speak out about this merger and wrest control of this country and its media from the liberals that control it.
Time-Warner isn't much better. A corporation that has the socialist maniac Ted Turner on its board is not worth doing business with. It is a matter of public record that Ted Turner gave a donation to the United Nations in the sum of one billion dollars. This is a criminal act, a heinous redistribution of wealth that intends to attack capitalism at its very roots. The very premise of capitalism is that work is rewarded and that not everybody gets to eat the best food or drive the safest cars. Turner, with his mafioso actions, is working to legitimize the liberal dream of wealth redistribution. If somebody is lying drunk in the gutters, covered up with the funny pages from the Wall Street Journal, it is not my fault. But Turner is hell-bent on making it my fault.
And don't give that "it's charity" crap. I don't want to hear it. "Charitable" contributions like the kind that Turner gives out are only intended to help the liberals. Every time some "aid organization" feeds a street bum so that he can live to get drunk another day, society creeps closer and closer to accepting the type of wealth redistribution that the liberals want to force upon all of us. That's why charitable contributions should be made illegal. Flame me if you must, but that's how it should be. If a poor family has a kid hit by a car and they can't afford the medical bills, then the child should die in a purely capitalistic society. Pure capitalism is about the cream rising to the top and the rest of society balancing itself out in an ordered manner. Charity attempts to destroy all of that. That's why it must be done away with, even if it's not "politically correct." It's not your fault that children in Africa don't have enough to eat, so don't let some liberal idiot lay a guilt trip on you and trick you into thinking it is.
That's why I laugh when the zealots post with "you guys suck" don't you have anything better to do?". The answer, yes, were regulars on /. Just like you.
.
Trollmastah
I was going to pick BN, originally, actually. But I decided against it for two reasons.
1) BN is now a subsidiary of... Name escapes me. Some Canadian rail line? So it would be too late for Campbell's.
2) AOL is not a good medium for transporting media. It can be done, much like Soup through FedEx, but I respectfully submit that even after the merger, Time Warner will continue to rely on RF signals, Satellites, Cable Networks, and so on.
3) CNN/CNNSi/Looney Toons are not the best media for marketing AOL, either. They certainly don't bring AOL to market. They could provide content for AOL, I suppose, but as has been discussed elsewhere, AOL is not really in the business of providing (non-pr0n-flavored) content, however much they pretend to be.
I stand by my analogy.
What I find scary in this is that AOL, for whatever else it did, was a strong supporter of open cable access (to their own end, but helping most of us none the less). And they were quite effective given their size. I can now expect them to do a 180 and try to deny other ISP access to 'their' cable.
Once when needing to instruct a [l]user how to add a long pause in an ATDT modem string, to dial the extension number after an automated greeting system answered the main number first (the modem was on an extension of the voicemail/phone switch), I told (rather, sang) to use 5 commas thusly: comma comma comma comma comma chameleon!
We both rolled on the floor laughing our guts out it was so funny.
There are eight (9) local FM stations that I get good reception on.. All but one (a christian station) are owned by two companies!
They do all kinds of innovative things, like syncronized commercials and simultanious commercials (commercials happen at about the same time; same commercial in multiple places).
It's really quite frightening.
You are overlooking several important points:
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Trollmastah
i like your style.
The very fact that AOL is the purchaser shows the fundamental instability in this merger, and in the "internet bubble". As the novelty wears off of the internet to most people, the bubble will burst and all the grandiose plans of these yahoos (pun intended) will crumble to dust. How happy do you think the stockholders of the media conglomerate (Time-Warner) are going to be when the AOL side tanks and drags their investment into the sewer. The market will correct, and is correcting by Katz's own argument. The internet is providing a cost effective outlet for alternative viewpoints. As the big boys become more homogenized and satisfy no one, the niche providers will grow. All this without the government stepping in to save us. Messy? Yes. Inefficient at first glance? Yes. But it has proven to be the best system for long-term health and stability.
Clearly the easiest way to stop things like this is to do away with the FCC. If you think about the FCC is the only reason that Radio and TV arent more like the internet. All the FCC functions to do is restrict the use of civilian frequencies so that only the rich and powerful can use them.
Because corporations won't have the priviledges that they now possess. In today's world, governments grant charters to corporations, declaring them to be "legal entities". Because of this, the shareholders (owners) have no liability for the actions of their company.
This is not correct. Shareholders have limitted liability. Liability is limitted to the amount of the shareholder's investment in the company. If shareholder's were not "shielded" from total liability, it would effectively cut the small investors out of the corporations. This is because if someone wanted to sue the company, they would sue the relatively poor investors who could not defend themselves. The wealthy owners who control most of the corporate decisions would not be sued because legal action against them would be too costly compared to legal action against the little guys. Since the liability is not limitted, the little guys could be sued for millions of dollars even if they only had $1000's invested in the corporation.
Also, even without "legal charters", large companies could still employ monopolistic practices. It is just a two stage process. First, the company competes legitimately to gain a large market share (There is nothing wrong with this and consumers are happy). Next, when the company is sufficiently large, it begins using tactics to drive its competitors out of business. For example, if the company is sufficiently large to have significant financial reserves it can lower the costs of its goods and services until they reach unprofitable levels. The competitors will then be forced out of business. The original company can then jack up their prices and more than make up for the "lost" money of operating unprofitably for a short time.
You might argue that when the company raises its prices that new competitors will enter the market. However, in many markets (software may be an exception as demonstrated by open source software) there is a barier to entrance (i.e., production facilities must be constructed, distribution systems established, retail outlets openned). Therefore, it will take time for the competitors to establish a foothold and during that time the Monopoly company will have replenished its cash reserves sufficiently to once again rout the competition. This situation is worsened if the Monopoly can use resources from one location or market to finance operations in another location or market where it has competition.
All these internet companies know they have no real value, so they are going to use the temporary insanity of their investors to buy companies with actual products and profits.
Moderators - the previous message was not flamebait - strident, maybe.
>There is NO evidence that deregulated markets result in more competition.
Well, by the limited definition of deregulated that our government goes by, I submit: retail, airlines, securities, internet. Virtually anywhere you live, you have choices of stores and products, you can fly on a variety of airlines, you can get increasingly better fees on trades, and you have a choice of ISP's. I could even throw banking in there, all it takes is a little work. It is caveat emptor, and you have to be intelligent, but the government does not need to hold your hand for you to make it.
>Even if you go back to the father of laissez-faire capitalism, Adam Smith, he addresses this point in the Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiment. He explicitly talks about the need to regulate to prevent large companies. Look at the history of start-up industries in Germany at the turn of the century: conglomeration followed quickly where the companies with the largest initial capital-base bought out their competitors. You are missing the whole point: the decisions made in/by/for companies/shareholders are necessarily to benefit those people. They are not thinking of long-term advantages.
No, I am not missing the point - I just don't agree with it. Size is not necessarily bad. In Smith's time, size and lack of size was much more of an encumberance than today, due to lack of communication and transport options. A large company can be efficient today in a way that it could not before, and a small company can compete over a geographically large area in a way that it could not before. Size is becoming less relevant, what is important are actions. Also, a company that neglects long term thinking is going to fail, and should.
>A smaller company with a great, new product will very easily be bought up be a larger, richer company. This, in general is what happens. It makes a lot of sense to reward the innovators beyond their wildest dreams and thus remove them from the market and competition. Possibly they could pluckily stick by their product and attempt to fight the larger company's strangle-hold over distribution chains and economy-of-scale pricing, but it's a risk. Result? most people will and do sell out - and they are rewarded handsomely for it.
This falls under the examples of coercion that are out of bounds and was clearly stated as appropriate for government oversight - in the same way that punishing physical coercion of an individual by another is appropriate for government action. If the larger company tenders an offer and the smaller accepts and goes to Aruba, well God bless 'em.
>You admit that the premier example of de-regulation: the baby bells are combining yet want to religiously believe that , but new players (cable telephony, internet telephony, wireless, satellite) are slowly emerging. - yeah, like AOL/TW !
Not at all religious - new telecom options are emerging, and are emerging slowly. They are concentrating on large markets and big customers. This is a direct consequence of the very nature of the market they are entering. CLEC's are emerging to take advantage of the existing POTS network through colocation. Again, large markets first, then smaller markets. I wish that it was happening faster, but you can shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which fills up faster.
>At best, the closest that reality approximates to your assertions is that there are standing waves of companies gaining monopoly, pissing off their customers, failing and then their large competitors doing the same. Who wants that? There will always be a monopoly even if it's not the same one. Regulate the fuckers! Make them do what we want - set a stated goal of service to the public, don't rely religiously on a belief that a system which has been around for c.150 years is suddenly going to become better!
No, what it means is that if the customer is not served with adequate value for their money, they will go elsewhere - even if they have to do it themselves (like Linux) or do without. If AOL/TW dumps all over their customers, then someone else will step up - local ISP's, Disney, etc. It does not have to be another megacorp, but it could. If the companies promise a standard of performance and don't deliver - that's fraud (a crime) and should be treated as such. (You seem to make the common mistake of believing that libertarianism == anarchism.) If they don't promise and you don't ask - well, buddy, you're SOL. Don't go crying to the government because you were too damn stupid to do your homework. This is not a religious belief, just simple fact. Businesses rise and fall everyday based on their performance. The market _is_ self-correcting.
BTW, capitalism has been around for thousands of years, not 150. I have no delusions that it will magically get better - I just know that everything else is worse.
Just noticed no one's mentioned the ABC/Disney/Pixar/Apple/Earthlink/Mindspring/Sprint /MCI coalition...
"There is a cryptic ingredient in many of our modern improvements - We are awed and
pleased without knowing quite what we are enjoying" - E. B. White 1939
Actually, I was under the impression that a purely vertical monopoly could still get in trouble in the U.S.A. - I thought part of the reason AT&T had to break up (no, the second time - with the LU and the 7:00 am - realised i cannot speak and type at the same time without sounding like a maroon) was because AT&T wanted to get into local telco, and LU sold hardware to local telco companies. Maybe I'm wrong, though.
Ok, now that's just ridiculous. THIS is a troll? Why? Because it mentions that Katz sucks?
Someone needs to review the actual definition of "troll". People don't even RESPOND to "Katz sucks" anymore. If I were trolling, I would be saying something that someone would RESPOND to, wouldn't I?
I hate AOL, but I really could care less about the merger. As long as they do not become the only choice of ISPs in areas, let the dumbass computer-illeterate people have their dumbass network. And the more AOL provides their own lame content, the more those dumbass users will stay within AOL's own network and not on the rest of the internet.
Actually I hope that AOL flourishes...because my company makes alot of $ off them. I must say though, it's difficult dealing with them because their projects seem quite unorganized on their end. Sorry- no more details for obvious reasons!
NightStalker (a really old handle!)
Slightly off topic for this merger discussion, but still one of the clearest recent cases of corporate pressure resulting in solid journalism being suppressed: . todd
Regular Person: Why do you say that?
Conservative: Because they didn't run the story that Rush Limbaugh dug up about the guy from Arkansas who claims that President Clinton once porked an Irish Setter.
Regular Person: Irish Setter?
Conservative: And let us not forget Bernard Shaw, Leon Harris, Joie Chen, and all the rest of
Regular Person: Them?
Conservative: They're anchors, for crying out loud! Ted Turner has to learn how to reign in his lippy negroes and chattery slanteyes. Look at Fox News Channel. They've got Bill O'Reilly, a good, powerful, white Irishman. That's what CNN needs more of. Foreigners should be behind the camera.
Regular Person: Uhhhh
Conservative: Get back here, you commie!
Oops, try again. Slightly off topic for this merger discussion, but still one of the clearest recent cases of corporate pressure resulting in solid journalism being suppressed: http://www.foxBGHsuit.com/
It's not quite that simple. AOL users are prevented from using parts of the net that are in direct competition with AOL sponsored services.
Depending on where you live, WalMart is indeed a a destructive monopoly.
Ladies and Gent's, PLEASE!
communism - political system
SOCIALISM - economic system
facism - Extreme Patriotism!
the three are usaully very closely related..but NOT the same thing! China has a combobulation of different forms of gov't and econ. systems. China is slowly becoming more capitalistic, and moving more away from socialism, but socialism isn't as evil as it sounds. Almost every European nation runs a combo socialist/capitalist economic situation. Britain (or England..) has gov't run utilities and public services (hospitals, Tv, radio, etc.), and private 'other stuff'...and nobody thinks England is evil socialist/communist scum? China IS a socialist/(now semi capitalist) Dictator regime.....kinda like cuba. Communism is a gov't run by the working class...China's gov't is run by a privleged few, much like our 'democracy' just without elections (as far as I know, china doesn't elect officials..)...well..i'm done babbling now...hope this cleared some confusion up...
I can't believe that it took this long to get this posted on /. This merger is pretty serious - some upstart (AOL) buying/merging the venerable old instituion (Time/Warner). Wow. Who'd have thunk. But then whod have thunk that Digital would now be Compaq (Q)! Wow.
I can't believe I browsed the the ayn rand site! GRRRRRRRR...I'm going to have to uninstall netscape, uninstall and reinstall linux, and wash my computer and every component I had connected to this thing including my monitor, because that ayn rand filth has contaminated my PC!
Monopolies destroy capitalism and competition. They create an impossible barrier to entry. As monopolies increase in number there will be a barrier to entry in everything. What meager business you can do, will be cut short because someone will have a freaking copyright on whatever you do, and someone else will cut you off at the knees with their multibillion dollar operation.
Basically the whole nation becomes a big company town. A fief with barons and lords, aka feudalism.
The very exact opposite of this is communism, where the government has the monopoly on everything.
In forestry they say the big trees keep light from reaching the little trees. Forest fires set by lightning storms (not by random campers) are what correct this problem. Likewise, if the US Government scaled back much of what it did and concentrated on basic things like defense, and breaking up monopolies, competition and capitalism will survive.
Like they say when the tigers are at war, the mice get to come out and play.
Without the jokes...
Cub and Rainbow -- I'll bet you're from Minneapolis/St Paul, right? :)
the reason Sony tanked when they bought the motion picture studio was because the japanese economy went balls-up and Sony couldn't afford to throw money at their new toy any more...well, that and the fact that they never should have bought them anyway...they were just fascinated by the cool movies and they were flush with cash...kinda like an American anime freak winning a lottery and buying a japanese animation studio, just becuase of what it is. IMHO.
I am buying more AOL stock when the price drops again.
I wonder if I can get enough salt? Definetly more then a grain...
oh, puh-leez...America isn't owned by the Religious Right...and the media _is_ liberal, by American standards. I mean, come on...doesn't Europe have real-live Communist parties, still? That even get elected to representative bodies? Observe how offended the media was recently when presidential contender George W. Bush said his most admired person (or words to that effect) was "Jesus". They (media) tore him a new asshole for daring to mention traditional religion in the context of a supposedly content-filled debate.
About 2/3 into the article, he started using less fact and more opinion in the article. No professional reporter would do that unless it was a pure editorial. And if it was supposed to be a pure editorial, then he had too much fact basing. It read 50/50. I think they need to keep it to one or the other.
I make no excuses for my paranoia, but here goes.
Anyone here use ICQ?
AOL bought them out a while ago, if I remember rightly.
Anyone remember that registry hack on Win95/98 you had to do to stop it checking your HD? I never wanted to find out what happened to the information it got on our users' PCs.
Now add to that thought that AOL owns winamp and will probably increase its stake in the MP3 world...anyone here ever download a dodgy MP3 off a warez site? I know I have (Themes from crappy kids TV I grew up with, if you're wondering).
Ok, so it's a Windoze app, but the Big Brother idea isn't just tied up with existing TW/AOL users, they could potentially get info on just about any half-clued up newbie who actually uses ICQ#. And heaven knows what other nefarious apps they'll come up with in the months ahead.
Privacy? What a quaint 20th century idea...
Of course, regardless of my fears, look forward to a big, BIG push in MP3 sales in the coming year. AOL won't just be combating ISPs/cable etc, it'll be going up against music formats, CD/MC/MD, whatever, in the years ahead. Not particularly of interest to slashdot, I know, sorry...
There, paranoid rant over and done with.
Wrong...the cornerstone of anti-trust law is to protect the consumer from illegal competition amongst companies. Anti-trust law deals with companies only so far as to discover facts in the allegations brought against them.
I just am curious why Jon Katz allegedly gets called by major new outlets to get a quote about a media merger. I mean, he's not:
a) an economist
b) a journalist
c) a captain of industry
And my two cents... who cares if they merge. I don't use AOL, and I don't read Time magazine. It's just for peons.
Think MSNBC or that GE owns NBC. Or Rupport Murdocks News Corp. Or CBS/infinti broadcasting... I think most aol users use it as a glorified ISP and go right to the web for content anyway.. It goes on and on...
Once upon a time when it was only possible to fit two maybe three radio stations on the radio spectrum these concerns may have been legitimate.
But today... There are literally dozens of radion stations in virtually every US market. There are 6 broadcast television networks and lots of independant broadcasters, over 500 cable channels, only a handfull of large book publishers but hundreds of small publishers, hundreds of independent magazines and newspapers, and how many websites and small ISPs?
It is ridiculous to talk about media monpolies in an age when we are literally saturated in media and the costs of starting up a new media outlet are as low as they have ever been in history.
Talk of media monopolies is breathless commentary utterly devoid of factual content.
Rudbek
Isn't that a bit like claiming that a Campbell's Soup (whatever their parent corporation is now) / Fed Ex merger would create a vertical monopoly?
What in the world are you talking about? All the TV stations out there are owned by several corporations...not just 3. There are 3 major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), but there are 2 smaller networks with plenty of pull (Fox and ________ - I don't know b/c I don't watch TV). There is a large difference between owning a station and being a network affiliate.
I'm not going to sum up the rules of TV ownership because I don't know about them, but there is FCC regulation for this kinda stuff. You also need to consider how many people have DSS/Cable who are exposed to 20+ channels of programming.
I agree that the merger is scary, but its not about the media - its about the net. /P?
You silly sod! Having half the internet means that you can force any crappy protocol you want into a standard. AOL could start using some shitty AOLCP (AOL Control Protocol), and the rest of the internet would have to start supporting it because of the sheer volume of people they have. Web designers have had to make sacrifices in design because AOL's crappy web browser couldn't do background colors in tables until recently. And AOL won't need to throw ads up anymore...time warner can run TV ads on all of their channels, and seeing as they own a good portion of them, chances are people will see them. You may think these people are idiots, but they vote and they have voices. If AOL and TW start brainwashing their subscribers, they can make every one of them do whatever they want, eat whatever they want, use whatever TP they want, etc. This is equally bad for ISP's, as now we probably won't be able to advertise on anything owned by time warner. That and with Microsoft having a grudge against AOL, all of the local ISP's are going to go bye-bye. MS is in a pissing match with AOL, so they'll do whatever they have to in order to crush them. If that means killing the local ISP's in the wake, so be it. We're all f*cked.
Considering that the jist of his rant is "they will do anything in their power to screw the rest of us for their own benefit", it's quite obvious that Katz understands this aspect of the corporation.
This total amorality is why counter force must be exterted every once in awhile.
And what if that advert were DIGITALLY ADDED in REAL-TIME?!?
The mind boggles, oh, yes it does.
Uncle Fucker!
This is a rather shortsighted viewpoint. So AOL gets 50 million mindless idiots, who cares? They're idiots! Well, some of them vote. Out of 50 million you'll get enough to be influential. They then vote the way the media (Time Warner) tells them to, (most people do, you know) and we all get stuck with changes we don't want. All 50 million of 'em pay AOL, and advertisers pay AOL/Time Waner even more. The company gets rich, and then buys EVERYTHING. Starting to care? It's easy to dismiss AOLers as stupid (they're on AOL!) but if you get 50 stupid lawyers together, and ten stupid judges, you have a problem. I know some perfectly intelligent people who have argued to me "But why not use AOL? It's not complicated, and look at all the great features!" These people are SMART. They've just bought AOLs lies about how hard the rest of the net is, and have grown addicted to all that "specialized" content. Stupid AOLosers are not always RL idiots. The point can be summed up this way: Beware of stupid people in large groups.
Let the big corporations set up the infastructure, its bound to be done sooner or later.. Everything in life changes. So learn how to get around their BS. Use it against them..
I personally think that Jon Katz writes well-crafted, well-thought out articles. I'm not sure what all of you like to scream and cry about; at least Mr. Katz has said something that you read. And he did it without screaming about 'lusers' and comments of 'what a gasbag'. I don't like the thought of the merger, either -- but Mr. Katz has sure taken a front line stand, while you (and myself, obviously) whimper in the comments and feedback section. If you don't like Mr. Katz' writing, stop reading it or stop visiting /.
Ah, no. I am a former AOLer. I'd say about 15% of the people I met on AOL used the web AT ALL. And about 4% of those went straight to it. Most AOLers don't realize how bad AOL is. Most non-AOLers don't realize how ignorant most AOlers are.
We need a "Katz" show at AOL-TW that would be an unscripted free-for-all that would have him ranting against the encroachment of anti-freedom. A little window on those other realities that just can't fit in a TV commentator's scripted mind. Get the show pulled a couple of times and then have Katz personally show moguls how things need to be done for the shareholders. I'd watch.
i have a friend... enough said. i have a friend who is black, speaks for all blacks. i have a friend who is a teacher, speaks for all teachers. your logic is downright irritable. stop using straw men for your examples and you'll start getting some respect from intelligent people.
Is there any way to give Trollmastah an automatic 5 on all his posts to Jon Katz articles? I think this would ultimatly provide balance to the universe, pay homage to the great iGuana and solve any anti-trust problems we are currently facing. In addition, this system of auto moderation would keep everyone at Slashdot happy and in good spirits, preventing the obvious pending riot across America. We're talking about averting an earth shattering, mind altering, dog walking, catastrophe. Plus the eventual advent of the Open Source Military.
I would hate to have to come back and post "I told you so."
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Actually, if I may. I believe that he put those comments at the beginning to illustrate how quickly this story got out and far reaching this story is. Just a different perspective.....
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
the market will adjust.
self-correcting.
slowly emerging
There is NO evidence that deregulated markets result in more competition. Even if you go back to the father of laissez-faire capitalism, Adam Smith, he addresses this point in the Wealth of Nations and his Theory of Moral Sentiment. He explicitly talks about the need to regulate to prevent large companies. Look at the history of start-up industries in Germany at the turn of the century: conglomeration followed quickly where the companies with the largest initial capital-base bought out their competitors. You are missing the whole point: the decisions made in/by/for companies/shareholders are necessarily to benefit those people. They are not thinking of long-term advantages. A smaller company with a great, new product will very easily be bought up be a larger,richer company. This, in general is what happens. It makes a lot of sense to reward the innovators beyond their wildest dreams and thus remove them from the market and competition. Possibly they could pluckily stick by their product and attempt to fight the larger company's strangle-hold over distribution chains and economy-of-scale pricing, but it's a risk. Result? most people will and do sell out - and they are rewarded handsomely for it. You admit that the premier example of de-regulation: the baby bells are combining yet want to religiously believe that , but new players (cable telephony, internet telephony, wireless, satellite) are slowly emerging. - yeah, like AOL/TW ! At best, the closest that reality approximates to your assertions is that there are standing waves of companies gaining monopoly, pissing off their customers, failing and then their large competitors doing the same. Who wants that? There will always be a monopoly even if it's not the same one. Regulate the fuckers! Make them do what we want - set a stated goal of service to the public, don't rely religiously on a belief that a system which has been around for c.150 years is suddenly going to become better!
2 words ... The Sopranos
I don't want AOL controlling good old Tony
Also, look what happened to Netscape after AOL took them over.
i see nothing scary,you don't like CNN,change channel,you have a TON'S more channel available in the US when compared to us (ok,bell's ExpressVu here do have 200 channel but it's odd that everyone will take them all).
you're also free to do your own TV channel (albeit lower quality unless you have load of cash) delivered on the internet too.
Canadian AC CanadianAC@NOSPAM.telebot.net
Uh, dude... That doesn't leave anything but "First Post, Beyotch!" for the rest of the thread.
We already had our "AOL Time Warner" thread. It was good. Information was exchanged.
This is, functionally, a reposting of the "AOL Time Warner" thread with "I'm Jon Katz and I'm very important" prepended to it, and a high-school textbook worth of misinformation and conjecture thrown in after.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
Point the first:
Although Katz's claim that there are things wrong with the media is correct, and although it is apparent on its face that there are things with large media, it does not follow that large media is worse than small or no media.
Point the second:
It is never established by Katz that AOL Time Warner is so large as to be damaging - only that it appears large because it is in a very obvious location.
Point the third:
Katz is a yutz.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
ME TOO!
-
Does Steve Case lean toward liberal or conservative, and will that affect Time Warner? Case hasn't shown any particular political leanings that I know of.
If he leaned toward being conservative, it would be interesting to see if finally we could have a media outlet that didn't have the huge liberal bias (I guess Fox news is trying to be more balanced, but I don't get them on my cable).
---
Well, we all know that Netscape is controlled by the beasts of AOL. Can somebody respectable (like maybe RedHat, Caldera, etc) please buy Netscape away from AOL/Time-Warner ? Pretty please? And yes, thank you Mr. Katz, we did already know that Steve Case wants to be the next Bill Gates. Except that he might be even more dictatorial and more maniacal that Slick Willy of Redmond.
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
I find it incredibly hard to believe that if I wandered by a day late and a dollar short, my story would be accepted, even if I said everything he did.
C'mon guys... why couldn't JonKatz contribute to the other discussion?
I've gotten really close to excluding JonKatz stories from my Homepage... this may have done it for me.
:)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
I refuse, on principle, to have a
I hate AOL. This jsut goes to show that there is no stopping the corporate megalith.
And look what happened to Compuserve. For a few years they were the dominant computer BBS, but as you say they attempted to keep their members from joining a larger community of users, opting instead to emphasize their proprietary technology. That strategy would not work in a world with such freedom to choose other options, so a small upstart called AOL grew much faster than they did, and eventually acquired them. I grant you that AOL Time Warner will have enormous resources and will temporarily be able to act monopolistic, if they so choose. But if the market economy teaches us anything, it is that you must innovate and serve your customers or die. As long as you are willing to take the long term view, people will always vote with their dollars and refuse inferior service.
Today's modem-based ISPs will be completely unable to compete with Time Warner and its cable modems, and DSLs are way too expensive to consider as an alternative to cable, so Time Warner is going to have a monopoly over Net access one day. This happens whether or not the merger with AOL happens.
AOL will provide the content, not the physical connection to the Net like people seem to think. The merger could help TW get all of those modem-using AOLers on cable modems. AOL users won't get busy signals anymore. AOL will provide AOL Chat and Instant Messages and AOL Message Boards.
The really bad part is that Time Warner will probably block all the server ports one day, eliminating one DIY aspect of the Internet, the ability of anybody to run servers. This would also effectively eliminate the peer-to- peer nature of the Internet, from the point-of- view of its noncorporate users. During the TW monopoly, you'll need some serious capital just for the privilege of having Sendmail listen on port 25.
And besides that, why shouldn't we be afraid of a future that holds cultural homogenization under a media dictated view of the world? CNN pretends to give you "world" news, but when was the last time you heard any "real" news about South America? (besides the anti-Cuban, pro-American slant on the child from Cuba) World news?! Bah... only if it involves Americans, a major disaster, or makes other cultures look bad (re. Chechnya).
The only stories we get about other cultures are the ones that foster fear and paranoia about them (to name a few: China, Russia, Cuba). How much does the average American know about Chinese culture other than Dim Sum, chopsticks, and that they have a Communist government (which, by some method of reasoning, makes the entire population a threat).
I'm personally very scared of a future that holds a population that forms its opinions about the world based on the five-minute world overview they get on CNN (either on Cable or the Internet). Sure there's more information out there on the Internet, but how many people actually take the time to find it (or even _have_ the time to find it). It's much easier just to go to the first news webpage you find (which would likely be CNN if you are on AOL now) or click on the TV.
content is for losers.. even John Katz is better than watching that shit..... they could buy up every image ever produced, gobble up the gutenburg project.. send assasins to murder linus torvalds.. and somewhere else deep in some basement there will always be someone preserving the old stories, someone writing their own operating system, someone keeping the fire of civilization alive... even as these soulless cocksuckers try to destroy us.
"Trollmastah" by Alison Chains
Another post from old Jon Katz
Eyes filled with zinging facts
First postah scrEEEAms to me from somewhere..
Anonymous because of mail bomb threats
Slashdot green was no safe bet
A.C. please, won't you help me make it through...
Yeah, they've come to snuff Trollmastah, oh yeah
You know he ain't gonna die, no
Yeah, here comes Trollmastah, aw yeah! yeaaah,
You know he ain't gonna die....
Wife and kids and household pet
Sold them all on E-bay on a bet
Now I got more time to reload this here page, yeah
No harm done just a little rant
They mod me down, in my homeland
Grits in my pAAants, and the posts they roll on in, yeah.
Yeah, they've come to snuff Trollmastah, oh yeah
You know he ain't gonna die, no
Yeah, there goes the karma, aw yeah! yeah,
You know he ain't gonna die
No, no no, you know he ain't gonna dIIieeee...
-=(not trollmastah)
Like all content providers, AOL *is* a government granted monopoly.
According to the US const, copyright is *not* a right and, in fact, infringes opon other's natural rights.
It is by the will of copyright that almost all large content providers reach their size.
Thus they are a government granted monopoly.
It's high time we stop this piracy or our rights. The framers never intended fictitious persons (corps) to have the same rights and abilities as natural persons.
Just say *NO* to copyright for corps.
(yes,yes I know.. I'm going to get moderated down because I'm not expressing a 'normal' view, but thats Okay.. I understand. (HA!) thats why I posted anonumously; no karma loss for me)
Before you freak out, note that this does not necessarily mean that AOL will instantly muscle its way into Road Runner operations, and start changing policies, etc. Road Runner is owned by Time Warner, but is its own company as well. It most likely will not completely change its business around into an AOL slave company. What might happen is that Road Runner will start providing aol access as an option, or add aol information services to its start page that you don't visit anyways. I don't really see that really dramatic changes are in store...
A serious, 'better' GUI is going to be no less confounding to the pedestrian user actually.
General purpose machines are simply too complicated for the sort of user you seem to be describing. This isn't elitism so much as it is a realization that the current (pretty much locked in solutions) haven't really been cutting it.
This is why monopolies are bad. They prevent sufficient diversity to ensure that everyone's needs are met. Instead of being subjected to random collections of spare parts, novice end users could be taking advantage of devices engineered for ease in an atmosphere of open and rigorous competition if the microcomputer market would allows such a thing.
This is exacly what Katz is doing - on 'our' forum no less.
Aol does not restrict access to information. Aol charges people for access to a highspeed netowrk ... and charges companies for access to those people ... I can't say what Time Warner does - they seem like a real "Big Media" company to me; like "Big Brother".
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
have you ever gone to a website hosted by AOL?
yes, and it was poorly done so I didn't go back. I have also been to poorly done tripod websites, poorly done geocities websites, and poorly done xoom websites. I usually avoid them. Unless there is something extremely compelling, and usually people with compelling content get real accounts, I avoid the large free account websites. They are filled with midi, animated gifs, bad backgrounds, and generally of bad aesthetic in general. If I do a search for something, I look at the URL before I click on it. This usually speeds my search time and gives me better results. find me a search engine that doesn't crawl the land of the trolls, and I will use it.
Ever used AOL instant messenger service?
yes actually, it got installed with some other app, ahh, viral marketing... and I knew an AOL user (co-worker)at the time who seemed really infatuated with it, so I tried it out. it's interface was poor, I found myself having to use the mouse more, it made a lot of noise. I didn't like it at all. IRC on the other hand, provides a much easier chat experience and i can install any client I want, I can do pretty much anything from the same window that I'm chatting in wether it's on my remote or local computer. I showed this to the AOL user, and although he agreed, he could not find the amount of *hot chicks* (fat housewives) on IRC as on IM, so he stayed with it. I think this is probably a good thing.
ever used icq?
yes, before it was bought and before it turned into a UI nightmare. It didn't do anything that I couldn't do with IRC, talk, mail, or ftp. In fact, you can do pretty much everything icq does on IRC.
ever received an email from or emailed someone with an AOL account?
yes, about 90 percent of the emails that I get from AOL are from spammers. I usually dont email them back. I do not block all AOL at the gate however, because people on my system have mothers and grandmothers who use AOL, and occasionally like to keep in touch with them.
Just because AOL is a large corporation, and they serve a large portion of the market, does not make them a monopoly, there are PLENTY of ways to get around the services they offer, especially since the services they offer are not unique. In my opinion, they are not even that interesting. and certainly not vital to anyone. AOL was and always will be (at least in my mind) a BBS with an Internet Gateway. Look at their technology. It is not designed to get you on the Internet. It is designed to get you on AOL. If you dont need AOL, you dont have to use it.
Oh, and to your Microsoft argument..
Why do you use word and IE on a mac? because they're a monopoly? or because IE is better than Netscape on a Mac and because Word is better than any other word processor that you could find?
You really need to think before you start whining.
- Run whatever the fsck I want on my own end (even 'fringe' systems like Linux, or whatever other stuff might come along tomorrow.
- Run whatever browser I want on my end.
- Run whatever dialup system I want on my end, and tinker with it (for example, for a while I had xringd set-up so that whenever I called my apartment with the right pattern of phone rings (let it ring 2 times, hangup, reapeat 3 times), my computer would dailup my local "mom and pop" ISP and connect itself, then generate an HTML page with URLS using its new current dynamic IP address (telnet://..., ftp://..., etc), and FTP this page up to the ISP's user-pages area. In this way I could, in a matter of a minute or so, get my home PC to connect itself to the internet, and tell me via the web page what its current IP address is. Thus I could, from work, go look at something on my home PC whenever I needed too without having to have the home PC actually dialed in 24/7. This sort of flexibility is just not possible when you can't pick your own dialup program or OS on your end.
I fear an AOL monopoly of ISP access not because I think AOL is bad all around, but just because it's bad for me. I shouldn't be forced to use the same limited selection of services that are deemed adequete for newbies. Call it elitist if you want, but because I do more with computers than most people do, an artificially simplified system like AOL provides is an obsticle rather than a help.Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Virginia Postrel is smart (and purdy). I like her book and agree with most of it. However, it doesn't take much extrapolation to see where this merger is going. I figure in maybe 2-3 years AhOLeTW will have us all by the short hairs. We probably won't be here debating this kind of stuff. :-)
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I am going to miss my cable modem too. Imagine the loss of bandwidth to the bloated aol client... My RR service has been almost flawless, tech support, great, full newsgroups with excellent feeds, and very few problems with their network. (ignore the people who say RR has a faulty TOS, they do not know the truth)
Now look at netscape, any mirror you pick goes to a very slow aol server, same with winamp. I can not find either of those 2 programs on anything but very slow aol servers.
If my RR service goes down the tube, which i totally expect it to do, looks like i have to buy a new house and get DSL.
First. Alot of people that use AOL like my mom that MIGHT benefit from this. ( I think ) This could mean more services that My mom really wants. (Like instant messages about TNT t-shirts for sale). A Cable modem for AOL? ( have no idea what these knuckle heads are planing). The only thing I worry about is not having the option to use these services with Linux. ( I would not be caught Dead on AOL).
Second. Who really cares as long as I can play quake3 with linux and 50ms ping.
Third. Ted Turner is a idiot. And Hanoi Jane Fonda is still a babe. (except she is as old as my mom).
Barbarella for ever!
My final point is they CAN'T MAKE you pay for this stuff. Just sit back and get ready to laugh if their plans flop.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
The problem is that most won't avoid it. Sure, you can avoid it because you are conciously doing so. Most will see nothing else. That's all that needs to happen in this fine democracy of ours. Most people will see what the media wants them to see and act on that. Being the majority, they can really screw things up for the rest of us.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
AOL must be stopped. The madness must end now.
"They invade our cyberspace, and we fall back. They assimilate entire companies, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn HERE. This far NO farther. And I will make them pay for what they've done."
Reread what I read. I never said that there was anything evil that Time-Warner did. Indeed, I clearly said that it DOESN'T MATTER how they got the monoply, just that they have it.
Regardless of the fact that it might not make much sense or that it might cost consumers more (and if you really think that's the case than you should be asking yourself what is so different about phone services that there should be competition there --also ask yourself when was the last time you saw a cable business that wasn't profitable...), the point is that unless you place restrictions on what can be done with that monopoly you create a serious problem.
What if an ISP made an exclusive deal with your cable company so that all Internet cable services had to come through that company? What if the cable company decided to only air news channel which were slanted to one end of the political spectrum? What if the cable company chose to cut off any media stations which were broadcasting news about their striking labor force? What if your cable company decided to use censorware on all Internet connections it provided?
What if you didn't have another choice?
sigs are a waste of space
Giving Time-Warner the monopoly wasn't necessarily the mistake. Whenever the government creates a monopoly it also regulates it. There are lots of rules about cable stations owning radio stations and other such restrictions which are designed to ensure that existing media monopolies don't limit our choices. The problem is none of them are Internet-ready. :-(
sigs are a waste of space
[yes, i'm fresh from taking a macroeconomics class, so, apoligies in advance.]
Basing the future of your company primarily on entertainment is very dangerous. Movies for instance, are are very dependent on properly aligning consumer taste & artistic talent. While 1999 has been a banner year for both blockbuster & artsy films, there are still an impressive number of duds being released.
Because of this volatility in success, no one studio is going to have a "monopoly" on movies. It follows that future Internet content will be nearly as difficult (if not more difficult) to pull off properly.
Analysts are so convinced that AOL/TW is going to spell big content, big broadband, and therefore big profitability, but I don't see how re-runs of Bugs Bunny and back-issues of TIME are going to attract billions of eyeballs & dollars.
If this helps build the broadband infrastructure of tomorrow, more power to them, but plumbing isn't (by far) the "interesting" part of the Internet, and I don't think AOL/TW is well positioned to do "interesting" stuff.
-Stu
http://www.newspoetry.com/2000/0111.html
Blakes_7
Interesting to note, tho'...
Which of these companies have the small margins imposed by maintaining and producing equipment? Of these, only Micro~6 and AOL/T-W sell predominantly Intellectual Property!
I concur. Now most of the information is controlled from one source on or off the net. That is not a good thing. Look at what Hearst was able to do with all the newspapers he once owned. His opinion had infected most of the world and people believed what his papers said. Now we have AOL and Time/Warner. Controlling a ton of information. It's bad enough that there are editors in the media that sensastionalize everything. I never liked time because rather than reporting they editorialize the news to their beliefs. CNN was once a media station that just spat out as much news as possible since they became apart of Time/Warner they too no longer report all the news just what Time/Warner believes. Think about how poorly the news sensationalized Columbine. Soon after almost every school targeted geeks and anyone who played doom. There is now a software that can profile potential subversives because we all know being subversive is being someone who wants to kill. Most of us agreed it was the media's fault. Alot that was reported took a long time until mistakes in original reports we caught and then the media took no responsibility to report the corrections.
Another case is Men chasing underage girls/boys over the net. I have never seen one report explain how many times this has happened. We you find crime statistics it's mind boggling that not that many incidents truly took place but the percentages that were expounded made it seem that 3 out of 5 kids were being harrassed by these people. Because the media has never had the ethics to truly report the numbers.
Time/Warner has constantly expounded the evils of being on the net and how dark and dangerous. And then with the other mouth expounded the good of technology (but look for this piece could become evil next month). Well, they now have taken care of what is evil by commandeering a good cross section of the people on the net via this AOL merger.
AOL I have always hated. Personal experience as well as those of others on the net show that if they deem your e-mail too sexually explicit then GOOD-BYE your no longer apart of that community. Remember AOL is Big Brother in the sense that they do actively monitor your communications via keywords and they will look at that nude Pamela Anderson Lee file that you have attached and if they decide that you have just been trading too much smut or offended someone else than good-bye.
So now is the time that your media will be controlled via Time/Warner and you personal info being watched by AOL. Welcome to the 21st century and say Hello to Big Brother. He's sixteen years late but we all knew he would show up.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
I don't just want to be consumer, I want to be a provider too. The really important thing about the net and the Web is that it gives everyone a voice.
What if AOL/Time Warner doesn't like what I have to say?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Sorry to pull sentances out from the middle of your paragraphs like this, but I simply must comment on the phrase 'less interesting.'
Back before the AOL connection to the internet, the net was still an intellectual vehicle; most people you'd find online were real techies or scientists.
Now at best you'll find mostly script kiddies or wanna be tech reporters.
And to go even further off topic, I'm afraid I'm seeing the same thing with Linux these days. The GUIs are all very well developed and strong; but again it's detracting people from the power and freedom of the command line. It's beaten windows by becoming windows.
Although better written internally, it's starting to take on the same philosophy of hand-feeding the user instead of empowering them. And that's alot worse.
--
How do you keep an idiot in suspense?
Tell him the next version of Windows will be faster, more reliable, and easier to use!
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
AOL/TW and Microsoft will keep each other in check. Internet standards will have to remain open in order for the Big Two to try to cross-lure each other's users.
With open standards, anyone with a server can continue to be a 'netcaster'. To put it in non-Internet terminology: AOL/TW, Microsoft, MCI/WorldCom, etc. are the big newspapers, while sites like Slashdot, UNCENSORED!, and The Onion are the 'zines.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Of course, no one's mentioning that you HAVE to have TW cable service to get their cable online service. That potentially doubles the price (or more) since you also have to pay $40+ for the cable. What if I want satellite, or don't even want a TV (OK, kinda a stretch in todays US society, but it happens)? I'm running numbers hoping to form my own ISP. I'll be able to resell my telco's DSL service at $40/mo. and still show a profit. Doesn't sound too bad to me.
Damn it: isn't that impressive? How'd you call that except CENSORSHIP? I'm moderated -2 on this one! The moderation guidelines recommend to focus on boosting up interesting post. On top of that there are dozens of 'grits' and 'natalie portman' which get unmoderated. My post is on-topic, it is indeed a flame, but it's not flame bait.
I'm not common on this Jon Katz bashing thing BUT ... I could'nt help but roll on the floor laughing when I realized the first paragraphs of his article only consisted in mostly self-promotion ... YEAH that's great Jon, you are contacted from all over the world to give your opinion about the biggest merger ever! Congrats! Beautiful! Lol!
I wonder what could be considered "evidence" here. The media treatment of the WTO protests? CNN's deep-sixing the data in the Tailwind investigation? Their gag order on their own journalists? The wildly inaccurate reporting on the accuracy of our weapons in recent wars, and their overlooking of the Pentagon's reports on the same?
There are hundreds of similar situations. It's hard to tell if there's anything to them, in part because there's been so little public discussion about them.
NPR is hardly independent these days, getting much of their funding from corporations (and so having to avoid stories that might run against corporate interest). About the only independent news sources left are the Pacifica stations, where it's frequently difficult to tell if the information is well supported, or being divined from the bottom of a crack pipe.
AOL does not have all the internet customers in the world. I don't use them, as a matter of fact, I only know 5 people that use AOL with any frequency. Hell, a relative of mine recently retired from AOL, and guess what, he has an email address from a small independent ISP in VA.
Just as AOL doesn't have all the People on the net, neither does Time Warner have all the news sources or cable channels on the TV. Last I checked, T/W had several large competitors (Hmmm.... A certain mouse comes to mind).
There will always be alternate avenues to news than T/W just as there are always alternates to AOL internet access. This is why a combined T/W-AOL is not a monopoly, and not necessarily a bad thing either. Last I checked, AOL does not stop you from seeing websites outside of their network. Hey, maybe, just MAYBE, someone reading this post is dialing into AOL. (GASP!)
The point is, this is no where near a monopoly like the un-said Washington State organization (and I'm not talking poke'crack) There is healthy competition in all the surrounding markets, and it is highly, very highly, improbable that a media giant could simply cause competition to cease.
-Relkin
The way I see it, the majority of AOL use is people having sex in chat rooms. Now that they (AOL) have access to media distribution (not that shipping AOL disks doesn't count as "media distribution"...), I think it'll only be a short time before we start seeing a lot more pr0n on cable!
Just junk food for thought...
here
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
The merger is not the end of the world, but it is disturbing. Perhaps Katz reaction is a little over the edge of the world, but I've learn from things involving freedoms (in my case censorship) that it's people like Katz responding strongly to the small wrongs that keep all of us free. Katz is on exactly the right track, and his sentiments are well developed.
Believe with me, my saplings.
You all know what is the problem??
Microsoft only made me laugh, but AOL/Time-Warner mega-company scares me.
No company and no man should have so much power.
You have freedom if you can choose, and to choose, you need two or more options, in other case, your're a prisoner.
I doubt any merger of networks will be forthcoming. It would be rather hard, anyway, the way it's set up now. Don't worry, the pipe will stay the same, you won't be getting lousy AOL ping. Now, as for content (www.rr.com) for subscribers, that may change. Who knows? It's still too early to tell, it'll probably be a few quarters before the actual merger happens and and the paperwork goes through. I wouldn't be too worried (As long as you ignore the new banner ads that stay in the upper left corner of the screen at all times. :)
I personally don't like working the evil AOL, but what can you do? On the bright side, this will hopefully help to bring cable modems (through Road Runner) to more areas, so we won't all have to live with POTS modems forever.
Oh yeah, and my opinions and views herein are not the opinions and views of Road Runner, AOL, Time/Warner, AOL/Time Warner or any other company. I'd like to keep my job, thank you very much. Blah Blah Blah.
So on the one hand, we have Microsoft and legal Findings of Fact which establish that the company has taken illegal actions to obtain and to maintain a monopoly within certain spheres. On the other hand, we have two large companies (AOL and Time-Warner) trying to merge, and they're more evil because you think they might do bad things in the future?
Perhaps you would not mind volunteering to go to jail on the possibility that you might commit a felony sometime? I didn't think so.
You can't legally punish someone in advance, can you?
Yes, the homogenization of 'American culture' (perhaps better written 'Post-modern Western Culture') is tragic, but many of us are willing to accept the consequences of Wal*Mart and McDonalds despite the drawbacks. Until that changes, you're going to be railing in vain. Being bland just ain't a crime.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
But what exactly is AOL Time Warner monopolizing here? They've just managed to get an edge on _one_ part of the net access/content delivery market, not all of it. It's not like AOL just said, "yo, the net's closed, go download new AOL 5.0 for access."
Katz didn't have this big of a hissy fit over the CBS/Viacom merger.. I think it's just cause AOL doesn't kowtow to him like the Boston Globe, etc etc.. I mean, please. Try to be at least a bit more subtle. Self-importance is one thing, but you don't need to share.
-s
---- noi non potemo aver perfetta vita senza amici -- Dante
this probably won't go over well, but here goes...
I am literally fuming mad over Katz's "AOL Nation" article. The mention of the government disallowing the Time/AOL merger is sign that he does not understand the basic tenets of capitalism. Logic and reason obviously hold no place in his brain, as he relentlessly bashes laissez-faire capitalism advocating a form of open-source socialism. there is nothing wrong with open-source, mind you, I love it - but what Katz advocates equates with doing no work and recieving the benefits of another mans mind. At least with linux you fucking contribute too.
*****chris lindsay ICQ # 6628472 Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Alb
Hear, hear.
And this is relevant why? Any AOL user is free to switch to another ISP at any time. There are several that offer the kind of no-brainer service that AOL provides, and most people know at least one geek who can help set up a real internet connection. If people are so stupid or helpless that they can't figure out how to switch ISP's, that's their fault.
If the American people are so stupid as to get all their news from one source, and not even think about it critically, I'd say we have much bigger problems on our hands than the AOL merger. And I don't see what this has to do with the merger anyway. TW already has ownership of CNN and several cable companies. AOL doesn't own any cable companies. If people are already getting their news exclusively from CNN, what is adding AOL to the picture going to accomplish?
I see that it was necessary to break up Bell into smaller companies,
Bell was a government-created and government-protected monopoly.
which are now re-combining like mad, because that way they can squeeze suppliers and the work-force and negotiate from a much stronger position than small independent contractors.
Be that as it may, they are also scrambling over each other to introduce new features and new products. Prices in the long-distance market have plummeted, and at least around here our Baby Bell has been introducing DSL at dirt cheap prices.
I remember the good old days of Big Blue. I remember that before the Asian cloners got going Intel were over-priced.
Be that as it may, the PC market has a number of big players, yet it is one of the most productive in the economy.
I note that once companies get to be large enough that it is a fraction of their income to lobby aggresively at Congress, contribute to the PACs, fund "think-tanks" etc., then they get to influence the legislation passed.
Exactly, which demonstrates that the threat is not Big Business, but Big Government. If the government were not in the habit of passing out subsidies and regulating everything in sight, it wouldn't be as much of an issue.
There were large numbers of other oil companies before the Standard Oil Trust, but they were subsumed.
Do you have evidence for this?
As a consumer, I'm happy that Blockbusters and Wal-Mart have taken over. They offer much more, and they make it better, cheaper, and easier.
I think you're wrong on all three counts, at least with respect to Blockbuster (we don't have any Wal-Marts where I live). The movies at Blockbuster are no better than those at the local college video store (they are, in fact, the same), and the local store, while maybe having fewer cassettes, has more of what I'm looking for (how large is your local Blockbuster's foreign section?). Blockbuster actually charges more than this same video store (i.e. already they've decided to abuse their monopoly on homogeneous entertainment). Finally, Blockbuster is not "easier." In terms of movie selection, I'd much rather talk to a 40-year-old guy who's been watching movies forever than some punk who needed a summer job and doesn't know diddly squat.
This is not a "morality" argument. As a consumer, I consider the rise of Blockbuster to be an affront to my choice of rental videos.
Aren't you dead?
The problem with this logic is that what people "want" is based on any given moment in time. Things change. What people "wanted" when they first joined the ranks of AOL subscribers may have little to with what they're getting today.
This merger disturbs me for vague reasons I can't put my finger on, but could be put under the rubric of 'Corporate Feudalism'.
It disturbs me to see a number of large corporations who are generally in control of a fair number of things, and who have enough money to gain the ear of government simply by blitz campaigning without even resorting lobbyists or shady campaign finance deals.
Large corporations and government make an unpleasant mixture. Both are big enough to affect the other, and the centralization inherent in a large corporation makes them easier to control. Witness the fact that the government would much rather make US-West try to censor what goes over it's lines than try to censor a million people sending e-mail.
Also, from a copyright standpoint... The more smaller players there are, the looser copyright laws will be. It's more beneficial for a large number of smaller players to share information than a few, big players.
I don't know. All this bigness is scary.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
No, it's not the same. It's more like if Campbell's Soup bought Burlington Northern (a railroad company), Cub, and Rainbow Foods (two grocery stores). That's a closer analagous merging.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Maybe if this goes through we'll finally see companies popping out affordable highspeed wireless network units. Lots more bandwidth and no central source to control things. And hey, it works w/ laptops! :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You forgot DC Comics in warner brothers.
i like ya jon, i really do. i read pretty much everything you post, and i mostly enjoy it. a small tip, though:
:)!
given your stature, and at this point in your career, the fact that XXX reputable news outlet called (early in the morning, no less) to get your opinion on something is a memory and accomplishment you should hold near and dear as a heart-warming little secret.
i.e., it's not something to put near the lead of your column. it just makes you look kind of pretentious and a bit amateurish. gauche, even. in the future, let people assume that a lot of reputable news outlets called you for your opinion. after all, we assume they call Pundit Rob. it's more subtle, you see. it works better.
'til next time, keep using that spell checker
-k. ^-^
-k. ^-^ ^D
Time Warner owns a wide horizontal swath of media properties in almost every concievable area.
AOL's purchase of Time Warner gives them the ability to coordinate an ad / media campaign across nearly every cultural media that you come in contact with every day.
If you think you can avoid being AOL'ed, or that this will result only in Bugs Bunny appearing everywhere, check out the list below. (I'm sure its longer by now).
Or think about it this way-- AOL now owns the news source for politicians around the world (CNN).
Sleep better?
Circa 1996, when the Nation did a story on media monopolies, Time Warner owned:
Warner Brothers Stores
Music:
Warner/Chappell Publishing
The Atlantic Group
Time Warner Audio Books
Electra Entertainment Group
Warner Brothers Records
Warner Music Int'l
SubPop (40% ownership)
Columbia House (50% ownership)
Time Warner Entertainment
Six Flags
Cable franchises (11.7 million subscribers)
Motion Pictures:
Warner Brothers
Warner Brothers Animated
cable:
Sega Channel (33% ownership)
Court TV (33% ownership)
E! (49% with others)
HBO
Cinemax
Comedy Central (50% with viacom)
Home Video:
Time-Life Video
HBO Home Video
Warner Home Video
TV Programming:
Warner Brothers Television (ER, Murphy Brown)
Witt Thomas Productions
Book Publishing:
Oxmoor House
Sunset Books
Little, Brown & Co.
Time-Life Books
Warner Books
Book-of-the-Month Club
Magazines:
Time
Fortune
Life
Sports Illustrated
Vibe
People
Money
In Style
Sports Illustrated for Kids
Parenting
Baby Talk
Martha Stewart Living
Sunset
Health
Hippocrates
Asia Week
President
Dancyu
Who
Entertainment Weekly
Cooking Light
Southern Living
DC Comics (50%)
American Lawyer (83.25%)
It also owns Turner Broadcasting:
Sports:
Atlanta Braves
Atlanta Hawks
Goodwill Games
Retail:
Turner Retail Group (Hanna-Barbara store at Universal Studios Florida, The Turner Store, Braves Clubhouse, and the Medialist)
Turner Home Entertainment Licensing and Merchandising
Programming/Production:
World Championship Wrestling
Hanna-Barbara Cartoons
New Line Cinema
Castle Rock Entertainment
Turner Entertainment (MGM, RJO, and pre 1950 Warner Bros. Films)
Turner Original Productions
Turner Pictures
Home Entertainment:
Turner Home Entertainment
Domestic Home Video
Turner Home Satellite
Book Publishing:
Turner Publishing
Multimedia:
CNN Interactive (web site)
Turner New Media (CD-ROMS)
Cable:
TBS Superstation
Turner Classic Movies
TNT
Cartoon Network
CNN:
CNNfn (financial network)
CNNRadio
CNN
Headline News
SportsSouth (regional sports network)
CNN International
CNN Airport Network
Hey! Don't go screaming bloody murder every time a couple of mega-corps get to know each other in the biblicial sense. Just buy some of the respective companies' stock. That's what I did. Besides, it's a widely known fact that major corperations are slowly taking over.. Didn't you read Snow Crash?
This may be redundant to your statement but in several ways this analogy does not hold. A VW or Honda can easilly succeede because they are equivelent or better then their US counterparts. The only foreign news service I can think of that falls in this category is the BBC. Not too many people are going to learn German or Japanese or Chinese (whatever dialect they speak in Hong Kong) just to get mass media news. PBS is the only TV/Radio station that carries BBC News (or any foreign program) AFAIK.
The only people that this doesn't effect strongly are Spanish speakers, they can get Mexican or Spanish news and have their own TV in Univision. I don't know how independant of the big 6 media giants Univision is, though.
Hopefully this will be made irrevelant by the _real_ Internet, sites like Slashdot provide semi-independant forums where the only megalomanical dictator is CmdrTaco. I worry a about his motivations far less than Case, Turner, Murdoch, etc.
Of course most of Slashdot news consists of links to other sources. If those sources are owned by the evil, social engineering, corporations than what. Right now the big corporations have the resources to fund journalists all over the globe. Not every potential news source has a computer and there is no repository for gathered information, or any way to search and find it.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
While I must admit I wasn't aware of all those other English speaking outlets of information my argument still applies to the masses of Soccer Moms and SUV drivers who seem to populate our country. They don't want to even read the newspapers let alone look for news elsewhere than People and the evening news. And as everybody knows, what the majority says goes (Democracy == Anarchy/Mob Rule much of the time). Whoever can control public opinion will get their way, even if it is provably wrong.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
I'm probably encouraging bad behavior, but I thought this was pretty darn funny.
Books: Little, Brown & Co. Magazines: Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, People (for the wife),Parenting. Cable related: CNN, and occasionally renting a video or going to a movie originally produced for/by or owned by: New Line Cinema, Castle Rock Entertainment, (MGM, RJO, and pre 1950 Warner Bros. Films), Turner Classic Movies, TNT.
Dollar wise, an even split between mags and entertainment, I'd say. But the printing industry gets some of the bucks from the books and mags, and AMC and others get bucks from the entertainment. None of the above get bucks from me for internet related content via AO(HEL)L.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I have never complained about the quasi-journalism here at /. but Jon Katz needs to calm the hell down. His apocalyptic conjecture is unwarranted and unprofessional. He should NOT post on front page space, and he should try reading more real op-eds before he expounds endlessly on what is not really "one of the darkest days" in Net history. History has seen and is seeing darker periods of media and transmission monopoly than this, and humans have always found a way to access important information. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop it, the Net only adds an inherent irony to a situation like this b/c it is uncontrollable. Just my two pennies.
"There are only two things men want more than money, power, and sex; praise and recognition."
Hold on a second. All the points you made defending AOL can be applied to Microsoft. The big problem with the AOL / TW merger is that this new company will encompass so much, and so many people are locked into AOL as much as, if not more than they are Windows.
There are no competitors with AOL as it is _now_, to tell the truth. They have the lion's share of the ISP market right now. MSN, AT&T, et. all don't even come close to comparing, and none of them look like they even have a chance to challenge.
I really hate to paraphrase Bill Gates, but he is correct when he said that in the software industry someone can climb to the top virtually overnight. Linux has tremendous momentum right now, and when something like Mandrake's new installation tool for 7.0 hits the shelves I don't think anything is going to stop it. Linux is soon going to be on equal ground with Windows. Mozilla M12 has also really impressed me, and for the first time since version 3.0 I think it has potential to rival IE.
However... In the ISP market, things don't move nearly as fast. Great software can be created with nothing more than some blood, sweat and tears, but an ISP takes a lot more, namely a lot more of capital. AOL isn't going to be overthrown anytime soon, but MS has always been on shaky ground.
With the addition of a content giant such as Time Warner they will have the ability to "shut the door" on the internet, and force (let's say persuade instead) users to use their content, and deny non-users access to their content, to try make them AOL users. This sounds much like a monopoly to me. At the very least it sounds like monopoly power, which is what Judge Jackson found M$ has.
You may believe AOL would never do something like this. But, I've never seen AOL truely embrace the internet. They've always seemed to resent the internet a bit, and push their own crappy content instead. The internet access was a neccessary evil to them, and with this, well... maybe it won't seem so neccessary to have their users browsing other sites, creating revenue for other people.
(this one is corrected, sorry for the bad grammar. )
Um hello?!?!
I take it you're definitely not an American. I am so I can speak.
Americans typically don't research things. They hear something, usually from the media, and then take it as fact. Pretty much if you control the media, you control this country.
It goes back to a critical thinking comment I made a few days ago. Americans aren't taught how to think in their schools. They're taught such things as "Let's all get along", "What kind of personality do you have?", "Don't tell the child he's wrong because you'll hurt his feelings and damage his self-esteem."
Don't get me wrong, Americans, for the most part, are good people. They're just caught up in their own little worlds and don't think about the big picture. It's the way we're raised and schooled.
I take it noone remembers or has heard about the seventies and early eighties? Mergermania was there too. I was way too young to remember and only know what I've read and heard about but apparently then it was just as bad as now, and it wasn't the people who stopped it. The economy crashed (or technically, recessed.). That's what stopped all the mergers.
Someone who was old enough to know what was going on then, please comment because I'm missing some really good examples.
Um hello?!?!
I take it you're definitely not an American. I am so I can speak.
American's typically don't research things. They hear something, usually from the media, and then take it as fact. Pretty much if you control the media, you control this country.
It goes back to a critical thinking comment I made a few days ago. Americans aren't taught how to think in they're schools. They're taught such things as "Let's all get along", "What kind of personallity do you have?", "Don't tell the child he's wrong because you'll hurt his feelings and damage his self asteem."
Don't get me wrong, Americans, for the most part, are good people. They're just caught up in their own little worlds and don't think about the big picture. It's the way we're raised and schooled.
I don't agree that In a given environment one organism/organization will tend to exploit and dominate a particular niche - environments are usually not that constant. Consider earth for example - a spadeful of soil contains millions of different species of bacteria and invertebrates. Even in simpler examples used in ecology there are complicated dynamic relationships - the simplest, perhaps apocryphal example being the Hudson's Bay trapping companies data on hares and foxes (just 2 species) that fluctuates up and down. Do either of them dominate? (Of course, if you define niche narrowly enough then you can specialize it to agree with your point).
So, I think that the trick is that the extremely limited evolutionary situation that is set up by our present market-economy is one that has effectively immortal organisms that don't need to reproduce, don't need to have varying offspring. So, right there we've removed one of the fundamental conditions that has to stand if we're going to get "evolution" (Ev = Variation + Selection). These entities are more like huge plasmodia/slugs slithering over the commercial landscape aggregating and digesting smaller companies. But that's because we've created the set of rules that provide them with an unusually stable, undisturbed environment.
the specs are out there and you have the tools to hand. What you need to do is to take the Sugar-app and pipe some of it's output to the Latte-app. Then you need to re-direct the whole thing into your mouth. If you think it's too complicated then probably there's a Latte-Mini-HOWTO. Of course, a true Free Software advocate would recommend getting the beans and grinding them at home.
Nope. A corporation is a physical entity - very different from an idea. An idea like information has very different modes of reproduction and dissemination. Isn't that what all the cyber-libertarians/OSS folks would claim? It is one of the central points that ESR makes at any rate.
The larger the biological entity [...] the more it suffers when a major change takes place inside that environment.
Again, not so. Consider how much a human suffers compared to a bacterium if the ground they are both located on becomes too hot. The human using his extra resources is able to change his immediate environment but the bacterium can't. Bacteria tend to be more specialized than humans as regards their metabolisms - hence they may be more susceptible to changes.
I take your point about immortality though, it was a foolish thing to say. I should have said "have a shockingly long generational span compared to other things". And, I would guess, though perhaps you can correct me on this that larger corporations tend to stay around longer? Expand or die would seem to be the motto for business.
So, with regards to a startup (they, the entrepeneurs have my warmest admiration and best wishes), I can imagine that being small is a terrible problem. I have seen it happen to friends companies...sure they're remunerated well, but there's the feeling of "we could have been great". Beamingly, and with cordial interest, Crush
Whoever moderated this as flamebait is merely interested in suppressing dissent. I can only assume that it is someone that has NO idea what libertarianism is about. Certainly their actions are at complete odds with the tenets of open debate. My post attempt to expose flaws in commonly held assumptions about markets being self-regulating, whereas one of the foremost philosophers of the free-market argued that this was not so, in his often quoted, rarely read works.
Look at the telecom industry
I see that it was necessary to break up Bell into smaller companies, which are now re-combining like mad, because that way they can squeeze suppliers and the work-force and negotiate from a much stronger position than small independent contractors. I look forward to seeing what happens with AOL/TW despite Case's assurances.
computer
I remember the good old days of Big Blue. I remember that before the Asian cloners got going Intel were over-priced.
automotive
I look at the fact that the automotive industry is so powerful that they have effectively wiped out public transport.
fast food industries
Ugh. Crap food at high prices. They cut out smaller business that provide tasty, interesting food. This is probably the most offensive example of big business. I am glad to say that I have eaten mass-chain-food only 6 times in the last 13 years. I much prefer the food that's available to me in several small places. Further (and this goes back to the automotive point especially) I note that once companies get to be large enough that it is a fraction of their income to lobby aggresively at Congress, contribute to the PACs, fund "think-tanks" etc., then they get to influence the legislation passed. They set the agenda. You say that there are a number of competing ISPs. Well, I'd argue that this is early days yet....there were large numbers of other oil companies before the Standard Oil Trust, but they were subsumed. Prior to this they competed fiercely on price grounds. Finally, the point isn't necessarily that they are ONLY big - it's how many of them are there? Would you worry if there were 2,3,....1? Wouldn't you rather that they were lean, mean and desperate to please? I know I would.
retail, airlines, securities, internet. Virtually anywhere you live, you have choices of stores and products, you can fly on a variety of airlines, you can get increasingly better fees on trades, and you have a choice of ISP's. I could even throw banking in there, all it takes is a little work
Well, actually not. As an example: where I lived for 5 years I witnessed the emergence of a large number of independent coffee shops, most of which were great. Along came one of the largest chains, opened stores sometimes right _beside_ these low budget operations. They ended up closing a few of them and those that survive find times tighter than they were. Yeah, I choose, but the large chain was trying to shut them down. A choice that allows me to take it or leave it is no choice.
Banks - banks have been gradually merging in many parts of the world. Canada certainly has fewer banks now than it once did. These institutions occupy a unique place in our society - we want large stable institutions, we don't want entrepeneurial risk taking. So it's not a good venue for competition - let the government run it. Otherwise we get what....? Junk bonds?, lost savings, people thinking that they understood enough to make an informed decision. You may be one of the few people with enough time, intelligence and expertise to research this area, but I submit that you are in a minority.
Your proposal that we all go out and research everything individually appeals to the arrogant side of me (I'm quite lopsided) strongly, but consider the inefficiency - we could all theoretically do without any FDA rules, FCC rules etc...you ate the burger? didn't you check up on E.coli 0157?..there was a paper in Microbiology Reviews just the other year on its prevalence in ground beef. Regulation on our behalf in the hands of an elected, re-callable ombudsperson is more workable.
If the larger company tenders an offer and the smaller accepts and goes to Aruba, well God bless 'em.
Amen to that as far as those being bought goes - but how is that going to affect the other small competitors? They probably can't match the tender. So, what happens if they're left with a useful, cutting-edge technology, which, like most things, needs other technologies to interact with? If those other technologies are all owned by a potential rival, they're screwed.
Size is not necessarily bad. In Smith's time, size and lack of size was much more of an encumberance than today, due to lack of communication and transport options. A large company can be efficient today in a way that it could not before, and a small company can compete over a geographically large area in a way that it could not before. Size is becoming less relevant
So, large companies become more efficient, offsetting the advantage of small companies in increased geographical distribution in the struggle for marketplace dominance. Seems like a net gain of zero for smaller companies.
new telecom options are emerging, and are emerging slowly.
hmm....sometime in the future? Sounds good, the future is going to be magical.
CLEC's are emerging to take advantage of the existing POTS network through colocation
I'm ignorant of what these acronyms mean. Perhaps your argument would be more convincing if I knew what they were.
With regard to the customer taking his business elsewhere, I can only say once again that a take-it-or-leave-it choice is no choice. Nor, to my mind is being offered a choice between two unacceptable alternative, or three. The free-market with its attendant court-cases, lack of planning and inefficiency is thankfully not something that has operated unchecked in the US and the first world for the last 50 years. The evidence of the success of a highly regulated, government controlled economy is there for all to see: Germany, Japan, the US , France to some extent. All these nations funnel huge amounts of tax-payers money into the manufacturing industries through, for example, the Pentagon budget. This drives research in technology which it would be unprofitable for entrepeneurial companies to do. Examples of countries that adopt true free market policies are Thailand, Brazil and Malaysia.
With regard to capitalism being around for 1000s versus 100s of years, true in a weak sense. Yet the ideas of interest rates and banks dates only from about 1600 and it is these financial tools that allow capital to flow freely. And it is only during the last century and a half that this system developed internationally.
...I usually don't like the "it's not the sort of thing that should be on /." tenor of anti-Katz folk (should those be Dogz? ;-) ) but Christ - who cares who called _our-own_ pundit? I can imagine the major networks holding their breath to here what the guru has to say - I hope that isn't true! Still I suppose that they found it hard to figure out the implications of this without the insight of an "Open Source Journalist". It's interesting too how he perceives Linux as having been validated by it's adoption by IBM. Sort of makes you wonder whether he got the picture.
This Libertarian think there needs to be some limit on how big and evil a company can get. Microsoft is evil because it used its market position to force crappy products on vendors and ultimately a lot of end users. (see also Internet Exploder.) AOL-TW would be evil because it would (not could, would) use its market position to... well, force isn't the right word here, "foist", perhaps? crappy content directly on the end user, with no need for intervening with vendors.
There is an FCC reg which says you can't own the dominant newspaper AND a TV station AND a radio station in the same town. (Cox Communications in Atlanta notwithstanding... they paid somebody off and got a waiver.) Despite my usually laissez-faire attitude, I think this is a good idea. There is such a thing as having control over too much content, and IMHO 30% is way too close to 50%.... when you control cable plant, over half the cable content, a goodly number of print organs, and you're now going to thump in and nab a third of the Internet as well... doubleplusungood.
True, those who Know Which End Is Up will get DSL from a CLEC, get their news from Yahoo's Rueters feed (thank the gods for British media), run Linux on their desktop, and be happy well-informed people... but all that means exactly jack when it comes election time. Us penguins get squashed. (I dare you to convince me that AOL-TW and MS-NBC wouldn't conspire to put some pro-monopolist in office if they could get away with it.) I'm sorry, this doesn't fly.
Time to write your congresscritter and tell him you want this investigated. This has two benefits: It slows the process to a crawl, hopefully starving it of resources so it won't happen, and it also keeps Congress busy so it doesn't pass any more assinine laws than it already has.
Yes, I'm a proponent of constructive chaos.
--
My name.... is NEO!
I'm thinking that the reason that everyone is no upset is because the verticle> move puts AOL/TW higher position to cut more people off in a horitonzal move.
:).
When this is accomplished they will have almost a position like one of the recent James Bond movie
Justen Stepka
How does one go about finding what "Time-Warner" means? I mean a list of companies that they own.
...and many many others. But where can I find a list? Is someone keeping track?
So far I've seen:
Columbia House Records
The Atlanta Braves
TIME
W-B
HBO (and Viacom?)
I see it as just a huge ISP company joining a huge media company... no big deal there, but is it ME who still gets to decide how do I view their content, or whether to view it or not... after all, there's still a lot of other media companies, in the US and around the world. Remember, the net is, again, that which makes this possible. Unless you get your content through a TW cable franchise. Admittedly theoretical: what if every email you sent out started having an advertisement for the latest Time-Life video attached to the bottom of it...
The problem is not THIS particular merger "taking over the internet" or whatever it might be trying to do...but the increasing stupidity of people in believing that they actually WANT a lot of the content that gets offered. Does anyone look at the stuff on the news/tv/magazines/movies these days. Its useless. Somehow an environment has been created where the mega-media not only gets to deliver content, but to tell everyone what content they want -- and have the people BELIEVE THEM
If not for the Y2K hype...I'd say it was 1984...
Speaking of AT&T.. that's would I would compare this to, not Microsoft.
Microsoft makes software to "increase productivity". AOL is a communications company, and so is Time/Warner. AT&T is a communications company that was forced to split up because of a monopoly. I can see the same thing happening to AOL now. It's all a matter of time...
Since Standard Oil, monopoly has been this big evil concept in the American psyche. Please remember that monopolies are not illegal, or necessarily even bad. Monopolies have certain rules placed upon them (such as the rules MS is alleged to have broken) which don't apply to other businesses, but the are not in themselves illegal.
No, I don't like the idea of homogeneous media empires, nor do I want AOL as my ISP, but lots of people do, or AOL wouldn't have the net worth to pull this off.
Ha!
Not only have you misread the article entirely, you are completely wrong about your basic philosophy. Try this article.
You actually suggest that we should look to other "guiding principles"? Like socialism, or communism, or fascim. All of these carry the same philosophy as yours.
Who cares? It's entertainment. This isn't bread, or houses, this is movies and magazines. Noone can reasonably claim a right to Sports Illustrated, and can choose not to buy Internet from AOL, or Time magazine from Time Warner.
/. sits up and cheers?
All this talk of monopolies and anti-trust brings me to another somewhat offtopic matter. Back in the day, IBM got slammed by anti-trust for giving away an operating system when they got server hardware. Now IBM announces that it will port linux to their server platform and have a free operating system for all their server hardware, and
Here's a little bit of wisdom from Mr. Alan Greenspan.
The world of antitrust is reminiscent of Alice's Wonderland: everything seemingly is, yet apparently isn't, simultaneously. It is a world in which competition is lauded as the basic axiom and guiding principle, yet "too much" competition is condemned as "cutthroat." It is a world in which actions designed to limit competition are branded as criminal when taken by businessmen, yet praised as "enlightened" when initiated by the government. It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge's verdict -- after the fact. In view of the confusion, contradictions, and legalistic hairsplitting which characterize the realm of antitrust, I submit that the entire antitrust system must be opened for review.
I have yet to understand why anyone thinks anti-trust legislation as moral, practical, or effective in reaching it's desired goals.
I don't trust any country with a national television station to have democratic free press.
The same thing happened when Walmart came to Canada. People organized anti-Walmart community groups and tried to block them coming to their town in order to save everyone from Low Low prices. I doubt many were succesful, and thankfully so. One report has said the cost of living in Canada is down 7% due solely to Walmart moving and pressuring other stores to lower their prices on their merchandise.
Read Alan Greenspan's essay "Anti-trust". You'll be enlightened.
do not accept them trying to do anything
STOP IT NOW before it is too late and you will
have no choices in anything !!!
companies like this must be boycotted and
destroyed !?
Being a monopoly has nothing to do with how the company gained its power over a market, it only has to do with its control over the market. You have to remember, the anti-trust laws were put into place because the government saw big-business as a potential threat to its control. If a company has too much influence over a major market, it can usurp authority from the government, and they dont like that, so they try and split those corporations up before they become large enough to do that. MS is up on antitrust charges because they do have enough influence to usurp authority, not much as of now, but unchecked, it will only grow. AOL Time Warner, having a vast amount of market control over TWO major markets, is a much larger problem, and depending on the outcome of the microsoft trial, could become an even bigger one. Lets say for instance, microsoft loses, they get broken up, there will be a vacuum where they were, and everyone is already lining up to try and step in if that does happen. Right now, AOL Time Warner looks to be the biggest contender, so, not only will they have the influence they have now, they will have a majority of what microsoft would lose. A very large threat, possibly.
The government usually disallows mergers if the combined company will dominate a particular industry. The only overlap that AOL and Time Warner have (other than the general field of "entertainment") is Internet access, since Time Warner has some cable modem subscribers. But since AOL fought to have cable systems open to online services, they may have to share even their own with other ISPs. There is still as much competition in the movie, television, and music businesses as there was before this proposed merger. The combined company may very well go on to wield too much power, but until that time, there's not much the government should do.
This is what Katz does...Just consider anything he writes as an editorial. If you want straight-up news, don't read his stuff. I happen to find his stuff interesting to read.
Just a suggestions,
-Fedallah
Actually, 5k/s isn't bad. "56k" lines have an actual maximum speed of 53k, plus network analysts usually factor in about 10% TCP overhead. 48.7k/s over 8 bits per kilobyte means that the theoretical maximum speed of a 56k modem is around 6.1 KB/s. I'm not a huge fan of AOL, but you can't blame them for _everything_!
Then you're going to realize that because you have noone else to turn to, they have no reason to rush to provide all these other services. Then you'll realize that you'll be lucky if your grandkids get to see those services, and if they do, that Time-Warner/AOL will be under no competitive pressure to keep the price low...
This is not necessarily true, if you look at this recent article from ACM Technews you will see that DSL is giving cable-modems a good run. I use DSL and I'll tell you it really kicks-ass. There are a few really bad DSL providers but in general they are doing an amazing job and the amount of competition is amazing. So although this merger is a big deal they will definatly face competition, maybe not from other cable-modem providers but from DSL.
Well, as a whole there are not just many stories that are being squeltched, but perspectives as well.
For starters, check out the Project Censored series of books, which detail 25 of the stories that just didn't make the news last year... I've been reading them for years, and it is fascinating to watch the censorship that goes on every day in our newsrooms.
Perhaps even worse is the limitation of speech imposed by the corporations. Entire segments of the population have little or no voice in our media today. Do you remember the last time that you saw a labor section in the newspaper? (They used to be there!) Take a look at the studies done on various news shows... Well over 90% of the time the same small group of indiviuals are heard from time and again. (Guess who they are?)
Incidentally, I also read yesterday that PBS signed a deal with AOL to distribute NPR and other 'content' that they create. Perhaps NPR is a bit biased too, since they are feeding from the same trough now...
Another book you might want to read is Ben Badikian's prescient classic, The Media Monopoly. While written many years ago (and regularly updated), it provides point by point what has been happening with the consolation of the press in this country.
Ginko
"PBS is the only TV/Radio station that carries BBC News (or any foreign program) AFAIK."
Public television / public radio, anyway. But that's just for domestic broadcast media. You can get BBC World Service 24x7 and BBC Radio 5 (at least) on the internet. You can get Radio Canada, BBC World Service, Radio Australia, Radio New Zealand, and English programs from Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands, Radio France, and who knows what else on a cheap shortwave radio. You can read the major Canadian, Carribean, Australian, British, Irish, Indian, Hong Kong, and another who knows what else newspapers -- in English -- on the web.
If you only hear things from the United States media, even if you only understand English, you've no one to blame but yourself.
Jeff
Preface: It's very refreshing to engage in a thread where users remember that this is not a black-and-white issue, it's most certainly quite gray and deserves some nontrivial thought and analysis. Bravo to the /.ers found here!
That said, I do worry a little about the merger, but moreso because the cable system is still a closed, government regulated system. This may make life tough for competitors in the same market space. On the other hand, though...
1. On the content side, I think the sheer volume of data and services available on the net is more than any company (or even oligopoly of companies) can control. The only way to achieve that level of control is through govt mandate/regulation. Since the Net is not the domain of any single nation, regulation will always be difficult/ineffective/harmful for the regulating country (witness the encryption fiasco).
2. On the content-delivery side, cable is an attractive option today. If AOLTW wants to make a buck, they'd better keep it competitive with other net access technologies. They do not have anything close to a monopoly in this arena, because the other players are numerous and growing rapidly.
A final note on your comment:
But look at the telecom industry, competition is decreasing, not increasing, and the industry is consolidating.
This is not entirely true. I think a major fallacy (seen in countless other posts) is that consolidation == less competition. Consolidation is a natural market phenomenon that fosters competition on larger economies of scale (greater efficiency). Witness the long distance rate wars -- 5 cents a minute is pretty damn good! Now we see the FCC allowing some local carriers to enter the long distance market, and vice versa. All of this is good for consumers.
To wrap up (and to reference the title of my post), the thing that scares me most is the totally one-sided view that Katz presented. I grant that it's editorial, and I'm not asking for objectivity in that space, but I thought Katz was absolutely inflammatory. Was anyone else irked by this?
- jonathan.
your basic average superstar,
is singing about justice. and peace. and love.
and i'm glaring at the radio, swearing,
saying "that's what i was afraid of."
- ani difranco
You make some very good points:
- Litigation and court fines can indeed affect the bottom line. Shareholders sole risk is the value of their stock.
- Yes, it sometimes makes sense to spend more money to crush a smaller competitor, because that competitor could become a threat in the long run.
But I'll have to disagree with you on these...I'll have to disagree here, I think you're assuming a static market. The revenues of a monopoly may be greater than that of a competitive market of the same size, but a competitive market will tend to grow much more rapidly than a monopolized one, and in the long run market-wide revenues will be higher.
Well, technically the EULA is a legal document, so they really can say anything they want. It's a contract: you want to use our software, here's our conditions. The essence of a free market is that the consumer is free to say "I don't like those conditions, what else is out there?" The fact is, as bad as M$ is, even they know that after a certain point, restrictive licensing will damage sales, customer satisfaction, etc.
Hmmm... while many corporate decisions are made with governmental interests involved (mostly tax-avoidance strategies), the vast majority of decisions are made based on whether consumers will see value in them, and thus buy more product. A free market dictates that ultimate judgement come not by mandate from some third party (govt) but rather from the consumers themselves.
- jonathan.
The bleating, drooling masses need their content spoon fed to them through media outlets like AOL - Time Warner, this much is true. But get down off your high horse, everybody here goes wild over the ridiculous, overpriced, business-man buyout, IPOs (VA, RedHat, etc.). We all have a contribution here, good and bad, but you have to remember, they can't take what they don't have.
If I have to, I'll buy a gigabit router, unplug the DSL, and throw a RJ45 line over to my neighbors house.
John
It's just the sort of thing that people will never doubt because it sounds like it ought to be true. People don't think much, in either direction.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
What you say is basically true but remember one important thing: corporations don't have _natural_ rights. There is no reason for them to have a legal right to exist other than because it's good for society in general as well as the individuals within the society. A corporation's "rights" are assigned artificially by law and the government, and should be removed or ignored if it isn't in the best interest of the nation at large. Of course, whether the government ever really knows what's best is an open topic, but definitely let's not get too deep into the "they have a right to do it" issue. Whether it is good or bad for the economy and people is a topic to consider.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
And so, the progression toward a world made out of ticky-tacky continues.
It wouldn't really bother me that less than a dozen companies control most of the media outlets if what I got out of them was good, original content. Instead, I get umpteen editions of last year's (or decade's, as the case may be) warmed-over hits. "If it works once, do it again until everyone's sick of it" is not the motto of a creative mind. Don't we want creative minds in charge of our content providers?
I'd also feel better if they represented my viewpoint better. Instead, I get news from the corporate perspective. They don't much go into how breaking news items affect us as national (or world) citizens; it's all about how it affects us as corporate citizens.
For example, National Public Radio's coverage of this proposed AOL/Time-Warner merger has focused almost entirely on how this will make it easier for the combined companies to advertise their products to us. To use their example, we'll be able to talk with Tom Hanks about The Green Mile in an AOL Chat Room, buy Green Mile T-Shirts from a Warner Brothers online store, see teaser ads on AOL/Time-Warner TV channels, magazines and in pop-up AOL ads, see the movie on AOL/Time-Warner cable, and maybe eventually see it again on demand through AOL high-speed internet.
From what the talking heads are saying, all this merger means for me is that the combined corporation will be better at convincing me to part with my hard earned money. Yet they report it as if it were a good thing. Which leads me to question - good for whom? Certainly not for me, and not for you. The only people it could possibly be good for are those who own AOL/Time-Warner shares.
But even for them: is it really worth it? Are even they, the shareholders, going to personally derive enough benefit from this to justify the losses they personally will face in terms of original content, being marketed to, etc?
Most importantly, we as a society must decide whether we really want all of our content to be provided by a few elite corporations. Capitalism works best when there is plenty of competition. Each merger brings the level of competition another notch lower. Is that what we want?
I know I don't want that. But if we don't put a stop to such insane mergers between humongous companies, we'll continue to get the corporatized, commercialized, and nearly choiceless world we deserve.
Within a few years everyone should have access to cable modems if they want them...I live in a small town of 5000 people and we've had full-bandwidth (10Mbps down / 2.5Mbps up ) cable modem service for a year.
Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
You say that they haven't done a better job, then they say that they've done a good job (with their idiot friendly interface). Which is it????
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Nobody loses if people are fired because a merger makes a company more efficient. There's now more money, to hire them to do something even *more* productive. In time, they'll find a job that pays even more than their previous job.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
How can the government save us from Time-Warner, when it's the government that gave Time-Warner it's monopoly? The reason you have "nowhere else to turn to" is because the government gave Time-Warner a monopoly. Now you expect the government to save you WITHOUT undoing its mistake? Not going to happen.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
..because it will result in a centralised information point.
If Time/AOL gets to be as big on the net
and in the media as Katz predicts, then they
decided what information should go out.
And because information is power, then they have
the power.
There are probably numerous horrendous things that
have happened in this world that noone reacted to.
This because they didn't know about it. Noone told
them. If one power gets to decide what should be told, then they can do whatever they want.
I'm curious how he would propose that we, the merry men and women of the Slashdot community, go about stopping the largest corporate merger ever.
Legally, the only people that have the power to stop the merger are the various government organizations that oversee enforcement of antitrust law and the financial issues of mergers. These entities get funding from various government sources, but we can assume such funding is probably regulated by Congress. We can also probably assume that these entities do not have a "consumer hotline" for you to voice your opinion, but rather that they serve the interests of the government and larger corporate america, not the individual citizen. And the media has no say in things like this; hell, AOL and Time Warner ARE the media.
The individual citizen isn't really sending the right signals anyway. Time Warner controls about 25% of music sales in the US, and we keep on buying. Time Warner owns "Friends" and "ER", and we keep on watching. AOL has 20 million subscribers, and more sign up every day. Why would these companies have any reason to think that we don't like the thought of them controlling everything we think, hear, see, and buy? We have not given them any reason to believe otherwise.
Before you go criticizing mergers and takeovers and corporate business plans, I would encourage you to look at the cultural structure that supports these things and their success; I think you'll find that you helped to created it.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Those monopolies are there for a reason. To have any number of cable-companies entering the market and wiring up the community would a) not make much sense and b) actually cost the customers more. These are monopolies that make sense. To say that another company would have to overcome "barriers" to get into that market, is misleading because, in a lot of places, it's impossible. But it's not impossible because of something *evil* that Time-Warner did. They just got a nice contract out of it.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
T/w owns CNN, Headline News, TBS, TNT, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, and fifty-fifty chance T/W owns your cable Tv/modem company.
AOL (owns Netscape) can now use those cable lines monopolistically, get exclusive content on the Internet version of those channels and magazines, etc.
Nervous yet?
In a given environment one organism/organization will tend to exploit and dominate a particular niche. Positive feedback loops lead to 1 organism/organisation per niche.
The trick is to put the negative feedback in without having the government breathing down your neck all the time.
Tom
...when I got home last night-honestly! Time-Warner is my cable provider. I found it amusing, then threw a Monty Python DVD in.
Can you please point me to a HOWTO that helps me achieve "interoperability with people who are using Microsoft Windows."? I am really looking forward to exchanging MS access databases, Excel spreadsheets and Word documents while using Linux.
Also maybe you should drop a note off to Dell telling them they should not force me to buy windows or office when I want one of their excellant and cheap computers.
War is necrophilia.
Oh! That's right! Time Warner. How 'bout that?
Wrong...the cornerstone of anti-trust law is to protect the consumer from illegal competition amongst companies.
Wow, you really do not know what you are talking about and just want to sound smart, right? Don't answer.
Anti-trust is supposed to protect consumers from "illegal" collusion and promote (always legal) competition.
Now go back to your commune and fix your sandals.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The typical argument I see is that oligopolies and monopolies can't exist with government control (or making them legal, etc), and competition should increase without market controls, but I don't think that is true. If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running
the world?
Not really. There is some tendency towards consolidation, which often leads to management efficiency and reduction of overhead, which makes a company stronger. But that only works up to a point. But often, large old companies in slower moving industries get sluggish and inefficient. Then newer start-up complanies get some oportunities to join the fray and spice things up. A prime example is the chemical industry. Long dominated by the pondering bulks of DuPont, Monsanto, Allied, and the like, but along came little bitty (by chemical industry standards) Gore Industries with its very popular GoreTex technology, and all of a sudden they are branching out in wierd ways. There's even Gore Dental Floss. Ironically, and to prove that Bigger does not mean Bettter, Gore developed GoreTex while working at DuPont, but the management was unable to see what they had, and sent Gore packing. Oooops.
(I suppose I had best mention for the sake of clarity that GoreTex is a waterproof fabric used in boots and jackets and coats and other such things, and was developed by a chemist named Gore.)
I think our government has been moving twords the Libetarian ideal for a number of years now anyway, with deregulation. But look at the telecom industry, competition is decreasing, not increasing, and the industry is consolidating. Even in markets that have been opened up to competitors (such as mine) for the baby bells, not much has changed, DSL access is still spotty, etc. How do Libertarians respond to this?
The baby bells are the wrong example to use if you are trying to examine the effects of deregulation. While there has been real deregulation of long-distance, resulting in some real competition and some real improvements and savings in consumer long distance (with some equally real failings) that has not happened in the local market. While there have been some token gestures towards deregulation of the local markets, the baby bells still have a strangle hold over local markets because of the long-standing local monopolies they have had, and the monumental cost of changing infrastructure which has so long been established. These have been very pointedly government protected monopolies, and there has been no effort to break them down.
There is a loosening of the baby bell stranglehold underway with the advent of wireless, where no monopolies have been granted by the government (possibly excepting cases of some small markets where only one company bothered to bid on a given chunk of spectrum). Still, it took local governments' collective decision on restricting right-of-way access to build the baby bell monopolies, and it will take some force of political will to rectify the situation. Make no mistake, the current atmosphere of telecomunications is far from a free-market ideal. These were and remain government enforced monopolies, and they still carry much of that bureaucratic momentum.
Obviously as with all economic theory, there are exceptions. M$ certainly qualifies, since I don't think their monopoly was really the result of government hanky panky. Whether or not they have crossed the line sufficiently for a Libertarian to support spanking them, and how hard, is still being hashed out in Libertarian circles, I think. I am OK with breaking up M$, but I just don't feel threatened by the prancings and posturings of the mainstream media.
And "Biblical proportions"? Katz, sit down, drink a Coke, and get some perspective, dude. Its just not that big a deal.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
You're right, AOL/Warner is not a threat - "Right Now". Give them time though. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not till a few years from now. They will become a threat however. As you stated, they are vertical, which as you also stated, means they don't need any/much outside help. That gives them allot of leverage.
Think about this. What if AOL/Warner doesn't just bumble along being happy with what it has? Like most companies, it's gonna want more. SO instead of buying more companies, they could just start selling contracts. What Internet/cable/TV service do you know of that isn't try to be #1 in areas like breaking the story first, having the most coverage or being able to supply all that information not only on a moments notice but in every media content available.
AOL/Warner has the ability to become a very powerful monopoly. AOL has already take many steps to ensure that you can't use their services any other way then the way they want you too. You can't just make a Dial-up for AOL can you? You have to use their software.
So what would be stopping AOL/Warner from going out to every service provider in Internet/TV offering them deals that they can't refuse. Locking them in on it, and then making it to where if you wan to access any of their services, you not only have to use special software that won't be supported on all platforms I'm sure and on top of that, making you pay for it.
Sure, you will have some people that will pirate it, but for the most part the company wins. Once AOL/Warner has reached a certain size, who's not going to be in bed with them? This really is one of those situations where it could be nothing, or it could really come back to bite us in the ass. I guess we'll see where it goes from here.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
My biggest reservation about the thing is I associate AOL with extreme blandness. It would seem that this would ooze its way into the rest of TimeWarner and cause the menu of American "entertainment" that much more lame.
This is nothing new or unusual. AOL has always censored their internal forums, with dissenting members finding themselves unceremoniously logged off.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I honestly have to agree. Even though I despise AOL and their profilation. I thought that at least the guys posting the news could try to be unbiased. If I want biased news I'd just go to www.msn.com...
Uh, no. I don't believe that AOL & Time-Warner are planning on releasing an operating system as part of their new merger. Or office productivity software. And while they *could* re-release Netscape(btw, anyone have any idea what the end result of this will mean to Netscape and the Mozilla project?), IE still contains a prodigious amount of the market share and is still being bundled with MS's OS. The only way this affects Microsoft is that their attempts to produce content are pretty much screwed.
--John
I don't think they have near the monopolistic power that Microsoft has.
Here in Rochester New York we have AOL, Frontier, several local ISP's and presumably Mindspring and Netcom for ISPs. If you want something fast, you have Time-Warner cable, and Frontier is now pushing their DSL.
If you want TV, you have Time-Warner, and several sattelite companies.
So far, I'm not worried.
George
Of course you realize that it is not TW buying out AOL, but vice-versa?
It benefits the owners of the companies. Ted Turner gained 2.x billion dollars in one day due this deal.
Don't forget Time/Warner and AOL are not in the business for the general public but for its shareowners. Its a simple fact that I think that JonKatz forgot in his little rant. For the vast majority of companies their main goal is to increase their profits/share value (there are some exceptions). AOL is not there for you the customer but is for its shareowners. AOL wants customers but only because they will eventually increase the share value.
Sorry if I seem abit redundant but love it or hate it its a fact of life that money is a great motivator. I think thats forgotten alot here, especially by JonKatz.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Admittedly theoretical: what if every email you sent out started having an advertisement for the latest Time-Life video attached to the bottom of it...
there would be either free internet access or a mass unsubscription move from aol's customer.
Canadian AC CanadianAC@NOSPAM.telebot.net
I've seen this done lots before on Slashdot, this worked out so well it's kinda funny. :)
Hold on a second here. Comparing MS to AT&T is not really fair to MS. I dont like MS personally, but MS has succeeded on the strenght of it's product and the strengh of it's marketing and brand name. The reason MS is number one is because they have never stopped giving away free Web Browsers, they have never stopped improving the software to give people what they (seemingly) want, they have never stopped making their service easier or flashier. They sell their product for what it is, and people buy it for what it is. People are not forced to use MS, they choose to use MS. Any person with half a brain and a HOWTO can find more economical (if not not harder to use) Operating Systems for a fraction of what MS charges without losing one bit of functionality or interoperability with people who are using Microsoft Windows.
Too bad the site is so out of date . . .
My last car was a Volkswagon and my current car is a Honda, but I don't speak Japanese or German so I guess I'm out of luck if I don't like the "big three" media conglomerates, eh? I don't think what happened with the American automakers was good for American consumers, American workers, or Americans in general. I think it caused the quality of cars to go way down, I think that people only by foriegn products when the domestic goods aren't up to snuff and I think having uncompetitive near monopolies were what caused the decline in quality of American automobiles.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
1. Atari was the biggest and most influential video game company in the world. They had minor competition, but they were in control of the industry.
2. Time/Warner saw Atari and said, "Look, a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see! Let's aquire them."
3. Through bizarre and grotesque mismanagement, Time/Warner managed to utterly kill off the video game industry for a time. Huge quantities of truly crummy content (the E. T. game, for example) were buried in landfills.
4. The video game industry was resurrected by Nintendo, who are still pretty big though overshadowed by Sony. We certainly don't think of Time/Warner/Atari as a player in the video game industry
So, mergers like this don't inevitably lead to domination of the industry, but they can be awful for consumers. (Try playing Atari 2600 Pac-Man for an example.) AOL is troubling to me for this reason, and I don't like the fact that they aquired one of their major competitors, Road Runner for this reason.
Oh, it seems I failed to relate this to my Libertarian ideals, well that's simple. I don't think the AOL purchase of Time/Warner is a good thing, but I have a strong distrust of government. I would expect rather than attempting to stop this, the government will do what it can to make life easier for AOL/Time/Warner. I oppose what Adam Smith called, "the wretched spirit of monopoly," and I should note that my attraction to the Libertarian Party is based on its devotion to the Bill of Rights, and not a personal love of unfettered capitolism. However, I tend to think that all economies ultimately concentrate economic power in the hands of a small minority, the difference only being whether private citizens or government officials have control of the wealth (the people who control the wealth will still have the nicest cars and best houses, whether it is because they are the leaders of the KGB or of Micros~1. The difference is that I can complain about Micros~1, but if I complained about the KGB in Soviet Russia it might mean an ice pick to the brain or a firing squad). That being the case, I worry more about strong government than large evil corporations, but I worry about both. (My biggest fear is of a mega-corp using its power to subvert the Bill of Rights for its own ends by taking control of the government though graft and corruption. I think that as citizens we must be watchful toward such things and do what we can to prevent them.)
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Just kidding. ^_^
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Upon reading about the merger, I didn't think it was a big deal. It wasn't until a few minutes ago that I look at the guy I work with and said "I'm scared of this whole AOL/TimeWarner thing."
Think about it. AOL is one of the most dominant forces on the 'net, and Time Warner is one of the most dominant forces in the rest of our media.
What if this new company wanted to fabricate media content. They'd own Magazines, Radio, Television, Newspaper, a well visited Website, an online News Service. They even have the ability to produce Motion Picture based propoganda, and distribute it heavily.
What if they decided to offer media time/space 'really cheap' to governmental organizations, presidential candidates? The media machine could have the power to pass laws!
Unbiased news sources could become a thing of the past. With a merger worth 350 _B_illion dollars, they can afford to squash/buy pretty much any other news organization who doesn't do their bidding.
Would we ever hear anything bad about AOL's service, CNN's reputableness (is that a word?), or Ted Turner?
I think I'm going to go home and read my copy of 1984 to cheer up.
There's only one sun and times owned by rupert murdick in jolly ole england, don't you know?
No wonder AOL has dragged its feet over DSL, they are about to own a whole lot of cable!
AOLanywhere indeed.
Sony must be concerned.. this is what they are trying to do: marry technology and content. AOL is marrying software and content. It quite represents the different focus of the US and Japan. But that is by the by.
Unfortunately for the geeks, this means the lowest common denominator continues to drive the net. Make it easy to use. Dumb it all down. Consumers consume and AOL is going to spoon feed it to them, $20/month at a time.
One thing I hate about AOL, is all AOLers are anonymous -- to the rest of us, but not of course to AOL. AOL knows or is in a position to know everything about their habits, but we (as in the rest of the net), see only proxyXYZ.aol.com, and Joe99@aol.com (probably Joe100 tomorrow). I am not saying that we should get demographics on AOL users, but it is rather chilling that AOL gets ALL the demographics and can do whatever it wants, and the rest of the world gets nothing. Absolutely zero. From the safety of the AOL citadel, they can do practically anything, (spam, insult, abuse) and it is up to the court of AOL to prosecute them or not, usually not.
For this reason alone, this merger is a Bad Thing as the government is giving them monopoly powers in dimensions nobody comprehends, except perhaps Mr Case.. instant messenger. Mapquest. Time warner. Email. Online shopping. Demographics. Katz is right, the spectre of a stock with more power than any world government, or even all world governments, is solidifying, and those friendly happy AOL users ("all my friends are on AOL") do not realize it, but facilitate it.
I'm starting a website just for things like this, where Big Brother and News Media are policed by the people and the truth can get told:
www.NewsPolice.com
Prosperity sure :). I have no problems whatsoever with prosperity, I'm honestly the most greedy person you would meet. Happiness? Maybe to Ma and Pa Kettle in Peoria, Ill. But look what the likes of Disney have done to locales like Times Square? It used to be a whole lotta fun down there. Now it's all corporate Disnified 'family-safe' fun. People would go to NYC and Times for the edginess, the sleaze...now it's rapidly becoming Disney-North. Sure, there's elsewhere to go, and these corporations can't possibly do that sort of thing everywhere, but you have to feel bad for those who were affected by it (i.e. the small business owners displaced by the Disney Store, etc..)
Basically, I think Katz is just scared that AOL-TW (there, I made an acronym) is going to homogenize entertainment for the bulk of the population. He may be blind as to other options (DSL for net access, DirecTV, Echostar, over-the-air NTSC, HDTV for TV viewing) but you all can't blame him for being a little scared.
Bravo, Mr. Case for your recent merger, I wish you the best of luck. But I think it's our duty as Slashdotters aware of other options to let the masses realize that they have a choice still in their entertainment/net access options.
Again, AOL-TW may be big, but there is so much more out there...ex. there's thousands of independent record labels from the kid with the DAT deck down the street to operations like Boxed (www.cluboxed.co.uk check it out!)...We just have to keep a careful eye on the new company to make sure they don't get too out of control.
The British SUN is a right-wing tabloid that has a topless woman on page 3 everyday. Somehow the "family-values" thing got lost on them when it comes to getting their 3 million daily sales.
So? Screw family values. If they don't want to see the titties, they can read another paper. Besides, what's wrong with a little skin (ooo sex scary!) We're a bunch of prudes in this country and it sickens me. Viva los titties! Sex is not bad (or if you prefer, fucking is fun!)
sorry about the offtopicness, but I had to spout off.
"Today's modem-based ISPs will be completely unable to compete with Time Warner and its cable modems, and DSLs are way too expensive to consider as an alternative to cable...."
I thought I should interject that in southwest Ohio, Cincinnati Bell offers 384/768kbps for $40 a month. If that's not competetive, I don't know what is. Also, unlike cable modem users, my bandwidth is mine alone; I share it with no one.
I've heard many horror stories about saturated cable networks (not that my telco is managing ADSL very well); I can't wait to see what happens when the system is flooded with hundreds of thousands of AOL users! BWAHAHAHAHA! If I were a current RoadRunner subscriber, I'd be afraid that the merger will interject some really half-witted policies that make it even harder for non Micros~1 users to use the network (e.g. stupid Windows based log in clients).
~Any apparent grammatical or typographic errors are caused by defects in your display device.
Oh please. Don't jump to conclusions based on the alleged actions of one AOL moderator. Did the person report the alleged action? I have no confidence in the media. For all I know, the reporter is making it up.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
I'm really not surprised at this latest move. It is common knowledge that no for-profit company is acting in the best interest of the consumer. They are acting in the best interest of their shareholders.
So, the judicial system and most of the internet "elite" were too busy watching the right hand of AOL/Netscape/Sun to notice that all three of them were interested in replacing MS, not displacing them. The real truth behind that lawsuit is that AOL (and Netscape and Sun) are jealous of MS's success at manipulating the market.
They all want our money, and they'll all use any tool they can to get it. That AOL and Netscape and Sun had to use the government to do it for them means only that they don't know how to tell people what they want to hear. Not as well as MS does, at least.
-ristoril
BTW, I believe that MS makes inferior products, and I'm using Netscape right now.
http://www.brillscontent.c om/features/bigmedia_1299.html
This merger may not be a monopoly, but it's another step towards the consolidation of creative culture into the hands of a select few companies. Where it may not matter so much if two meat-packing concerns join forces, when two companies that control media content merge, it removes a point of view from the available choices of consumers. And that's a bad thing.
In this case, the merger of AOL and Time Warner potentially removes the point of view of non-Time Warner content from the choices of AOL Users. And if mainstream America follows its normal course, the vast majority of those users won't even notice their loss.
Well, here's one point I have not heard discussed about the merger:
Time/Warner has had some pretty spectacular failures trying to get their content online. Pathfinder was one of the early large commercial content sites, but it never took off. No matter how T/W tried to structure it or reorganize it, they just did not capture much interest on the Internet.
This was not a hostile takeover. Time/Warner wanted this just as much as AOL did. I think it is interesting that one of the largest, oldest old-media companies decided that it needed to sell the company to an online content provider in order to survive.
What this signals to me is that Time/Warner sees that the media distribution of the future will be on the Internet more than print, film, or television. It's kind of a backhanded compliment, but still it shows that large companies are taking the Internet very seriously and that they must see online content displacing television at some point in the future.
I don't want to sound like I'm getting all gushy about the merger. I like plenty of choice and I am concerned that the merged company may try to create their own segregated area of the Internet. Still, if they are able to deliver video on demand and some of the other services that we have heard about for ages, I think there will be a huge number of consumers who will flock to the service. These will likely be the kind of people who don't know that usenet and irc even exist, and with AOL Time/Warner they may never get the chance to find out.
Yeah, the combo of AOL/TW is pretty big, but I don't see how this will really impact anyone now. Will they do anything that they haven't before as seperate companies? Does anyone have a list of what the two owned before? I think their interests before were fairly unconnected, and I don't see how the merger will affect things to any great extent. Will the AOL side start publishing or the Time/Warner go into ISP/network stuff? If you didn't use AOL or you boycotted Time/Warner (I think they own ABC, not sure), this merger should have zero effect for you. AOL dosen't have a monopoly on ISPs, and although Time/Warner owns some broadcasting stuff in different media, they don't own it all. Again, I don't know what T/W owns, but I think if you compared all of they to all other resources out there, there isn't that much.
I still did not get what was wrong about this. It is damned if you did and damned if you didnt for big corps. IBM's embrace is good. It has gives more validity for Linux as a desktop OS. IBM just announced that it would support Linux on all its platforms.
Lower costs for small businesses.
More products to run on Linux.
Life in the Enterprise.
Better pay for super geeks.
More investment and validity of Op.Src. efforts.
I dont see a flip side. In one simple stroke IBM has a million people (and some brilliant minds) working for them - on all their different boxes - not just PowerPCs. No MCSE or bullshit. So you need an enterprise server - Linux for OS/390. Run Zope with PHP with a DB2 backend. Or leverage your investments in AS/400. And all free (hmm. I doubt that - but not surely $1000 CALs). Besides it puts the pressure on SUN, HP and others to do the same or die.
And to top it just imagine Linux Hardware Conferences in about a year. With compatibility suites for every Linux release. I don't see anything wrong here.
As for AOL. Too many egos - disparate business focus. Chase would cut Time/Warner into 3 or four pieces, keep the cable and sell of the rest in some meaningful shape and still make money for the rest. Monopoly ? yeah - it has the potential to own the cable and hence the internet service to my house. Imagine Bell Atlantic provides me DSL for $49. It does have other providers (CLECS) who give me the same for slightly more. Who would I go with. Same would be the case for Cable. The surprising outcome could be, that cable industry gets opened up with being able to pick your cable provider - like your long distance provider. (Yeah right !)
I log onto the internet via ISDN and a local ISP. I read some news on slashdot, I check out a couple of other news pages (CNN being one). I look at some game news, I might even cruise over to google and search for Carpinus caroliniana to see if any new articles have been written about this tree. So what, how has AOL controlled my net experience? Have they somehow limited the sites I can reach, have they pushed other sites off the net? Hardly.
4 months from now Roadrunner will be available in my area. As of right now I will pay for installation and then continue to pay my old ISP $9.99US to host my web page because Roadrunner is a closed system and I can't choose IPS's. Either AOL forces Roadrunner to open up, or it doesn't. Either it gets better or no change, big deal.
These FUD's about big company mergers and the end of society as we know it are getting to be quite silly.
mark stephens
We don't all live in your neighborhood, you know.
- Tom
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Ben Begdickian (sp?)has an interesting book called The Media Monopoly in which evidence of an interesting twist on Moore's law is presented. Basically, in the same amount of time it takes for the power of computing to double, the number of corporations controlling ~90% of the mass media is cut in half. (He does not explicitly state this correlation with technology, but the numbers work out very closely.) The last time I read this book was '94 or so. I think it was the 4th edition. The number of major media strongholds was at 12 I believe. What I find interesting is that since then, there seems to have been a shift in focus. As we approach "absolute zero", we find that this is actually occuring more slowly than origionally anticipated. Instead, what we are seeing is that more powerful and diverse names are getting in the mix. In the past, big players included (and still include) GE, AT&T, etc. It was easy to finger these guys, but what was difficult was tracing down the "family trees" of these companies. This is becoming increasingly difficult as the gene-pool is becoming rather homogenized. As it becomes easier to play "Six degrees of separation" with large companies, corporate incest is making it more and more difficult to trace the impact of a media monolopy.
Which of these companies have the small margins imposed by maintaining and producing equipment? Of these, only Micro~6 and AOL/T-W sell predominantly Intellectual Property!
But also, which of these companies have the lowest barriers to entry in heir sectors, and which of these companies can be replaced the easiest?
The same ones.
Portent:
AOL, Time Cite Social Goals
The holdings of the combined companies will be, (assuming that nothing is sold off):
Time-Warner + AOL
What I find to be the more worrying is that Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, chairman of Bertelsmann AG (the company who wants to bring you a self "self-regulating" internet), sits on the board of AOL. Further, Bertelsmann is a major minority owner of AOL. This means that they will have a significant say in the direction of AOL-Time-Warner. So although they may not hold all the keys to all the media outlets in the US, the combined Bertelsmann-AOL-Time-Warner will hold enough of the outlets in in Hungary and elsewhere that they have the potential to set policy. Further, Bertelsmann will have more of a platform to launch its net censorship policies from ( wait for Time magazine to write "How the evil internet is poisining our youth and what we can do about").
If Hegel is correct, then this monolithic concentration of information and cultural influence should develop a most interesting antagonist. The likes of a greater /. :)
Great article. And I think it makes some very valid points and some very frightening realizations. Having our imformation chosen and censored by a large corporation is no better than having it censored by the government. This merger is just as much a threat as the CDA a few years ago. Something needs to be done.
Actually its more fare reaching than the net.
This was the darkest day for humanity.
But are we suprised? No. Free speech is inherently a bad idea because it usually only insites anger. Regulated speech is bad because people are angry for not being able to epress there ideas. No speech is bad because nothing gets done. Having our thoughts neatly packaged by people smart enough to become millionaires at our expense so that we can be ruled by them is kind of convenient. At least we won't have to bother with our own opinions now. Ahhhh, Fascism.
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
life hasn't changed much
What about the comedic value? I'm sure you got a kick out of that stunt he pulled at the Timberwolves game. (He had police unexpectedly 'escort' a referee who had made a questionable call and then debatably engaged in a profane display for the crowd) And how can you help but laugh at his acting in Predator after you've seen some of his less rehearsed political performances?
.sig: Now legally binding!
"The cornerstone of anti-trust law -- and the idea behind a free press -- is that the individual citizen/consumer benefits from openness, choice and diversity of expression and opinion."
Baloney. The idea behind a free press is that the person who wants to speak and publish has a right to do so, regardless of the affect on the audience. The cornerstone of anti-trust law is freedom for the competitor to compete.
Rights come from the gut instinct of the individual or are divinely given to the indiviual - same source actually. Groups such as the general public or the government don't have any rights.
If it should turn out that everyone in the country except Katz prefers to get their news & entertainment from Orlando, or from Time/Warner, this is NOT a problem. Diversity has no virtue in itself, although diversity may have a utilitarian value in its being adaptable.
The virtue comes in the freedom to be different if you want to be. As long as ludicrous tiny little concepts like the original Slashdot can grow into medium-sized Andovers, we have nothing to fear from America-On-Time.
Thank you, PokemonMaster.
The gist of it is that Time Warner Online wants to get more and poorer people on the net (i.e. reduce the cost). In light of bravehamster's comment, that AOLTW is a vertical monopoly, meaning it doesn't force anyone to go through it but can provide its service at low cost, this is interesting.
Imagine a Time/AOL ISP that is extremely cheap, say, under $10 for unlimited modem access. Except it's only unlimited in terms of time, because you are forced to use the AOL Browser, which limits what sites you can go to. TWAOL can say, "If you want porn sites, romz or warez sites, or the like, then just pay more for another ISP." They can call it something catchy, like "Unlimited Winternet access," and justify the content controls to parental porn paranoia. Suddenly, what Time Warner's customers get so see is not the free and anarchist Internet that we enjoy, but the parts of the Internet that Time Warner wants its customers to see.
Which is what most people want. They just want to see the sports scores, trade some stocks, and check their email. So competing ISP's, which aren't vertical monopolies, have trouble staying in business. Suddenly, this vertical monoppoly starts expanding sideways.
Unrelated note, or perhaps not: Remember now that this conglomerate now owns Netscape. Go Mozilla!
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
Hi, I'm not him, but this got me to thinking, it would make an interesting lil' survey-ish type thing, right in the middle of Slashdot, even if I was the only respondant. ;)
What kind of soda did you drink today?
RC Cola - 2 cans Dr Pepper - 1 regular fountain drink
What kind of car were you in last week?
Well, last week I was in a lot of taxis, but this week I've been almost exclusively in my Yugo.
What brand name clothing do you own?
Well, I have a pair of Airwalks that I didn't pay for, a couple pairs of Levi's and the rest all comes from the Target Clearance Rack, independent of advertising.
And for the record, I make it a point to encourage sheep to not be sheep, only up until the point where it becomes pointless. And I set my mom, a never-used-a-computer-user up with a dialup connection to a local ISP. With time, patience, perseverance, and such, you can get yourself and those in your local sphere of influence pretty much off the mainstream cultural grid, and making decisions based on what it is they want, not what someone is telling them they want.
keeping the world safe for prematurely grumpy old men for oh, about 7 years now
The wailing and gnashing of teeth coming from the likes of CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, CBS/Viacom, ABC/Disney, the NY Times, USA Today, and Katz...are a great reminder of just what a media monopoly we have here. Those other monopolist wanna-bees are mad that AOL/Time Warner has dropped a fly in their soup. I am buying more AOL stock when the price drops again. You know it will, when Maria on CNBC gets thru bashing it. Heh heh. Its a wunnerful country.
Oh, no - he made it quite clear that the free market is good for everyone, as long as it's good. It's only when it's bad that it must be controlled.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
What you should really be concerned about is the possibility of a Looney Toons licensed AIM.
No, really.
(Yeah, it's the same Warner. Not the same as Kurt Warner, though.)
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
I don't know what's scarier: the proposed AOL-TW merger, or the fact that Katz is actually right for a change.
The problem here is that AOL-TW are trying to get away with controlling a means of mass-communication.
The reason the Internet is so cool is that it's available to anyone with the know-how and the money (buy a computer, register a domain name, publish your own web site). The Internet isn't owned by anyone, and no single entity can completely bar me as an individual from getting access to the net. I can publish on it and access it through a variety of different providers and companies.
With AOL-TW, we will have an arrangement that is much like the cable companies, only worse. Corporate control of an entire means of mass-communication, this time by a single company rather than a few companies. If Joe Schmoe living in his parent's basement comes up with a cool idea for a show about some obscure topic, he can't just do his own show and put it onto the cable networks. He has to be "accepted" by the stupid social group--the social group of $$$ greed--that runs the cable networks. Chances are that we'll never really see a "Wayne's World" on cable TV, but we see tons of personal home pages and opinion sites and fan sites and hobbiest sites all over the Internet.
If AOL-TW gets away with their merger and slowly converts the majority of Internet users over to their higher-speed, easier-access, easier-to-use service offerings, then it will literally suck the life out of the Internet. Most people won't be using the Internet anymore, they'll be using AOL-TW. And that will make AOL-TW's service and connectivity the standard. Everyone will want to be able to "publish" and be heard on that standard, but only companies with tons of money and motives that fall in line with AOL-TW's will be allowed to "publish" on it. And THAT is the scary part here, people... the thought that in the future, the mainstream computer network will NOT be open-entry for everyone, but instead will be "read-only" for the masses, controlled by a single company.
In any other industry, this AOL-TW deal would immediately be recognized by the government as a monopolistic move. But I'm afraid that won't happen here, just because the people in the government just don't recognize that AOL-TW are *trying* to set themselves up in a monopoly position.
I'm scared for the future. Don't take your Internet days for granted kiddies, because they may be gone and replaced by something awful in not too many years...
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Reliance on facts and not dramatic emotional ravings!
Wow, when was the last time you saw that on /.?
Don't be afraid of the merge. Just look how the History is being writen.
/.ters should promote and write the Bazaar side of the History /. model and promote it among other non Geek communities. /.ter in a non technical company should compromise to create an internal company bulletin board. It's quite easy.
Linux exists despite MS, and today IBM adopted it.
The AOL/TW merge is only the Cathedral side of the mass-media production/delivery game.
We,
We are the Reporters, Analists and Consumers of our own information and news. Just grow the base of the users of this
Every
Go Zope grab your copy of zope in the desired flavor (Unix,...etc) and install the squishdot product. You will have an instant bulletin board that any one could use.
Let's help people to create, comment and use the information they really want.
Let's make true "News for NON Nerds Stuff that matters"
I think you're overhyping AOL's/TW's abilities. Maybe they're attempting to control information, to be the internet's portal/information source, but I don't think they'll win. Although AOL happens to be one of the largest ISP's, and TW one of the largest media outlets, I seriously doubt anyone has that much to worry about. I don't know that much about Time Warner, but AOL's abilities at managing anything, much less the information of a nation, are nill.
Look at Netscape and just about anything AOL has touched. A couple years ago, Netscape was in the vanguard of the internet startup model. People were practically religiously tied to Navigator/Mosaic as the end all of Microsoft (and Internet Explorer). Yet only a year after AOL took over, Netscape is in shambles, most of its staffed has cashed in and turned over, and Communicator is stuck on 4.7 (even though 5.0 was supposed to be out a year ago).
The only really savvy thing AOL has done right so far, is to spam the general public with their installation diskettes. They are not a threat.
I think the most compelling thing we'll see out of this is Warner Brother's cartoon characters dominating AOL commercials.
BrandonIIRC, they don't update the site until the newest book has been out for a goodly amount of time. I don't imagine they sell a lot of copies, so undercutting their primary (non-public) means of revenue probably isn't a good idea.
Either way, the stories are fairly chilling, even if they weren't written just yesterady.
As per usual, I will point you all to Project censored.
Think your media is anything close to independant? Think it's giving you a good idea of what's going on in your country?
Think again.
it's an internet company buying a more conventional one. It's no more or less threatening than any other giant media empire. As for its threat to a free internet, there is more threat in AT&T quietly buying up every cable company in sight and then needing to be taken to court to allow other companies to access that bandwidth. What has Jon Katz to say on AT&T buying MediaOne?
DK
This disturbs me.
Quoting the first few lines of the article:
Tuesday January 11 9:36 AM ET
AOL, Time Cite Social Goals
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The blockbuster merger pact of America Online and Time Warner aims to make the world a better place by fighting social ills, the heads of both companies said Tuesday.
``This is not just about big business. This is not just about money,'' said Gerald Levin, the Time Warner chairman who will be chief executive of the new linkup.
``This is about making a better world for people because we now have the technology and the instruments to do that,'' he said in a round of early-morning television appearances with Steve Case, the on-line company's chairman.
AOL and Time Warner isn't all that bad Are you out of your mind? AOL coupled wiht Time / Warner will not only control what half the internets population sees in the media (AOL, Comuserve, Time/Warner Cable) it will also control what half the regular population sees as well (CNN, TIME, SI, etc.) This would be by far the worst thing that has happened since the creation of the free economy. It would be like taking a step backwards into the days of the Standard Oil Company, which realistically owned the United States with its financial might and influence. If this merger is allowed to take place, there will be no turning back. It would be over.
Funny you should bring this up.
Here in Columbus (OH), there was recently a dispute between Time Warner (cable provider for most of Ohio) and the Dispatch Broadcast Group (owners of the ONLY daily paper in Columbus, as well as the local CBS affiliate and a statewide news network - ONN). The Dispatch wanted ONN on Warner's expanded standard cable lineup in Central Ohio (it was already on other Warner lineups in Ohio). Time-Warner said no, likely because they want to offer their OWN statewide news network later this year. So the Dispatch threatened to pull the over-the-air Channel 10 from Warner's cable lineup.
Time-Warner offered to put ONN on the new digital service, while at the same time (unknown to most Central Ohioans) threatening to pull ONN from other TW cable setups in Ohio - I only know this because my parents get TW cable in Dayton.
So basically, they had a big staredown, and both sides backed off 2 days before the Dispatch's deadline of Jan 1, agreeing to maintain the status quo until a better solution could be found.
Now, for people in Columbus this wasn't a big deal. Rabbit ears can always pick up Channel 10, and Americast is available as a cable option in almost all areas of the city. But for people in the rest of Ohio, they nearly had an independent (relative to the cable provider) news source pulled. In fact, they likely will when TW gets their statewide news service in place. I can see a conflict here.
AOL is based here in Columbus. While they don't have a monopoly, they do have a huge market share, especially with newbies (who don't understand how easy connecting with a third-party ISP can be). The ignorance of the general public only serves to aid AOL-Time-Warner's market share and "monopoly" over media outlets, especially in areas served only by TW cable, or that don't have local, reliable ISPs.
I think this real-world example points out a very real (and more likely, IMO) scenario that threatens free press / non-biased information.
Cheers,
Brian
Well put. I'm a Libertarian myself (a slightly left-liberal one), and as such I'm a big believer in free-market economies. Ideally, you would get that negative feedback from the consumers. People would say "hmmm, AOL-Time-Warner is getting pretty big. I see a potential problem here reconciling my personal freedoms with a Big Brother-esque company and their practices. We the consumers should knock 'em down a notch."
Sadly, that doesn't happen. I don't think that the educational systems here in America are giving kids the appropriate tools for critical independent thought. I would consider the ability to critically assess something far more important that the ability to integrate something upon high school graduation.
Until kids start learing these skills in high school, I think that - in this case - the government has a responsibility to look out for the long-term liberties of their citizens.
Consumerism is changing the traditional view of Big Brother as government into Big Brother as multi-national corporation, with it's own media branch.
Cheers,
Brian
I have been a subscriber to CompuServe since April 1994.
Finally, in January 2000, I'm on my final tether, close to leaving. I'm filled with nostalgia, but AOL has turned my pleasant ISP into a hellhole.
They didn't start off right - their service was, at first, fairly hard to use and charged £5 an hour - but once they corrected these problems - I can still remember the days of paying £10 for a free five hours, a package which AOL uses to this day - and released the NetWinder software, everything changed. Now, I could dial CSi and get a real, *real*, PPP Net connection. (I set up CSi manually under Windows 95 and NT4.0beta2. I once was able to connect under Slackware Linux (v3.2). No more.)
Version 3.0 of the software came out, the first to be supplied with a real browser. It had a lovely, blue interface that not many people appreciated at the time. It had a fast connection time. It was fast on the Net.
And then AOL intruded into my world. I had once used one of their trial disks, and threw it away after two days. The circumstances of the takeover were humiliating: WorldCom bought CompuServe, and then gave AOL CSi plus a hundred and twenty million dollars in exchange for AOL's networks. To this day, I have a real hatred for MCI WorldCom.
There were not many changes, until last year. They introduced the "CompuServe 2000" service. In practise, this means: "The AOL software with new icons." It shares the AOL membership database and AOL's telephone number. It is AOL, except without a hideously coloured login screen or any content whatsoever.
I'm still paying a hideously large amount of money every month for unlimited access to CompuServe, but I have an account with a free ISP (Freeserve - I'm in the UK) and plan to fly very soon. It will be a pity to see the nostalgia go, but the merger has decided it. I'm going before my nice service becomes a dumping ground for sound files of Bugs Bunny saying "You've got mail."
I think that's all I can explain, except that there are still many people on the service who feel like me (the beta forum is full of people saying "Which ISP should I go to now?") and that CompuServe are people who deserve to be left. Because now, only the newbies who are persuaded by huge, lying-scum marketing budgets will be living here. Don't pity me, AOL - I'm just the messenger.
A very well reasoned, well stated post. Quite refreshing, actually. :)
---
Starring Steve Case.
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-
Now, who get to play Bond and let Case fall at the hands of his own devices?
Bond: "You forgot one thing, Case..."
case: "What's that?"
Bond: "Give the people what they want."
Bond presses the button that causes an auto-forwarding e-mail virus to send free AOL software to everyone on the planet at the same time, causing servers to spark, explode and collapse in a pile on top of Case.
Case: "Noooooodaodas.dsa.df,safdnlsKg...."
[/satire]
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Mindless drones don't like people who are different. People who like to control mindless drones certainly don't want any fish swimming upstream. And perhaps you (not you personally, but all of us who think) are not so immune as you might think.. Mind Control and Indoctrination is a science. Why would it affect us any differently than anyone else? Check out The Ad And the Ego
** That link I sent was a linkless page, so here is the rest of the site... ** Negativland
Time-Warner/AOL would ... monopolize both content and the means to transmit it.
add a pinch of paranoia:
only recently has the capability existed to alter live broadcasts in real-time
and you have the recipe for a single company not only to control but alter the content of "live" broadcasts seen by the majority of Americans. Yikes.
No naughty words on your TW hosted web-pages!
Dear Luser:
Your AOL/TW web page was found to be in violation of our new, extended Terms of Service. As you know our AOL/TW guides have compiled a list of naughty words and have determined that you are using foul language, and have had your webpage and associated AOL/TW Screen-Name removed. Please contact our customer service department between the hours of 8a.m. and 10p.m. to resolve this matter.
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Seriously, I havent seen one thing from AOL / Netscape that works well. Oh, ok AOL Messenger. Geez. Gimme a break. This is going to get better in the future? Sorry, folks, I'd rather side with Microsoft on this one. At least their spin doctors don't dictate what I can and cannot see. This AOL/Warner thing just plain gives me the creeps.
spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
Indeed, AOL being this big is bad, but if they too must fall... I hope they kick some serious Microsoft butt first
Blender And Linux Fan
StarOffice ?
and keep this post to the point:
"...and a 500 pound fat fuck sitting right in front of me."
What's my point? Carlin is talking about the fastest way to get out of an airplane, but his plans would be spoiled because if there's a crash there ain't no way George is getting around that guy. George is, well... fucked.
My point? While the fat fuck may veridical, he's also _really_ wide... there ain't no way you're getting around him... provided there are not any other ways to go. Fortunately with the press (at least right now) there are. If you want to get something out on to the public, talk to your local newspaper (not owned by the fat fuck) and they'll put it on the wire service. (also not owned by the fat fuck) If it's worthy news, everyone else will pick up on it, (except the fat fuck, presumably) and therefore people will see it. People rarely get their news from only one company.
At least, that what it'll be like right after the merger. However, with all the fat fuck's ends, he won't stay content very long. Fat fuck will start gobbling up independent and small news agencies faster than my chemistry teacher does extra salted pretzels. When this starts happening the remaining size 7s will say in unison, "oh shit!" They will then immediately start cannibalising until there's only a few left. Bang, Ford GM and Chrysler. Ooops, I mean Time Warner, Viacom and Murdock.
In short: the sky is still well suspended above our heads, contrary to what Katz loves to proclaim every other week or so, this is just evolution and "modernizing", if you will, of the media sector.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
...
that's what I wanted the subject to say. oops.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
How do you think presidents are elected? By convincing these millions of mindless drones that they are the best person for the job. If you control these mindless masses you control how the majority of the country thinks. With control of the masses comes power.
OTOH, Maybe I'm ignorant on the scope of this issue, but I still have to have faith in the system. People are arguing that the very information we see, hear and read will be controlled and manipulated to suit the agendas of the mega-AOL-TW ceo. Have you ever seen a press conference given by the Pres of the US? You see how many mics there are? There are so many outlets for information I think it would be close to impossible to control them. Granted, %90 of people get their info from the big sources like CNN, TIME mag, CBS News, etc, but there still are hundreds of independent sources of information. How can mega-corp control all of these?
Another issue is the very size of the company. We're all assuming that everyone who works for ALL of the companies owned by TW and AOL will automatically do whatever nefarious bidding the CEO of mega-corp wants. But we're talking about independent companies who were happened to be bought out. They still have a sense of individualism. I'd have to trust that somewhere along the line, someone inside one of these companies owned by mega-corp will say something about how something was surpressed because the ceo of mega-corp didn't want it revealed. As soon as the ceo starts tightening up, more people will slip by. As Leia said "the tighter your grasp, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." (or something like that.)
And there IS always the justice dept. There still is anti-trust law they have to worry about. I think they've learned from Gates what happens when a large company ignores the gov't.
I don't think we're at the point of no return yet. This large company is worrisome, and I would love to see the deal struck down, but I don't think it's the end of corporate america.
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
I emailed this to a bunch of close friends, just wanted to share it here... "As of this week, individuals, people who believe in free and diverse speech, those who believe in the free distribution of information and unrestricted navigation of the Net, have a new and potentially much more menacing opponent than Microsoft ever was." This describes me to a T... Everything I've appreciated in the Internet for the past 7 years and perhaps in computers for the last 12 years, could be in jeopardy. Is this a reactionary statement? Possibly... but AOL has a way of taking something perfectly normal and grinding down the technical qualities until it's nothing but a dumbed-down advertisement that you have to click every five minutes so they can make money. I'm for human enlightenment and education, not in exploiting what people may not know or may not see. For those of you who don't know, I subscribe to Time Warner's internet service, RoadRunner. If I find my service changed in anyway, content *or* delivery (aka proprietary systems, degredation of bandwidth/efficiency), I will immediately discontinue my service with them. And I urge anyone else to do the same. And I will let RoadRunner know of my intentions. To think, locally, I was influencing people to use the RoadRunner service as an alternative to some nightmare like AOL... It's a sad, sad world. Also, if anyone wants to know particulars... I am already setting myself up with a contingency plan... (Local DSL service, possibly free). Get in touch if yer interested. ;) >From my personal standpoint, I work for a broadband company. We manufacture hardware for cable networks. Will we sell out into the Time Warner/AOL web of doom? Or will we join the resistance and pour some R&D into things like DSL and offer some competition? On a lighter note, I heard on the radio, the deal is not yet sealed, pending votes from the Time Warner shareholders... (also, someone informed me it was only a merger, not a buyout... yet, AOL shareholders hold 55% of the stock? Hmmm...) Can anyone let me know the specifics on those last facts? I will probably email this letter out to a few friends as well as post it on slashdot....
FLR
Oh no! Please don't tell me that they own Slashdot!
If Katz was so worried about this, why did he have to be "woken up" to hear about. Hasn't he jacked in to the major news services yet so he can prepare a proper sermon...
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
A merger like this would produce a company that could manipulate the thoughts and feelings of numerous people. China serves as a beautiful example.
In China, the government runs the media, and in doing so they have a tremendous influence over the way their people think and feel. About a year ago, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Kosovo. While this was a terrible thing, the response in China was overwhelming. The Chinese media showed images from other grusome scenes in order to stir up fears. The media in China also failed to air apologies and explanations for the happenings in Kosovo. The media controlled what the people thought and felt on one particular issue, and I see nothing that would prevent this new company from doing the same thing.
Yes, this may sound far-fetched, and it probably will not happen in the same degree as in communist countries. However, a media giant like this would indeed have the power. Another example. Ever been involved with a news story? Ever been interviewed? Often times only pieces of this will shown in order to make a point, or show one side of the story. Ineed, some of this manipulation of people's thoughts and feelings goes on today, and I think that a this new AOL/Time Warner company could and would use this same power. Maybe not for some horrible world plot, but maybe for promotion of porducts or sponsership of political ideas that would benefit the company.
Yesterday really was a dark day in history. I hope this merger is stopped.
Wouldn't hand-delivered disks provide a higher bandwith than AOL?
A monopoly is really about having the only position in a market. Not just the largest. I have been on the Internet for 11 years, and have never once used AOL. I can't say the same about Microsoft after having used PC for 15 years.
If anything, AOL is competing with hundreds of smaller ISPs. IIRC, AOL started charging a flar rate only after smaller ISPs were doing the same. This cost AOL millions in expanding their phone lines, and they certainly lost revenue from the high-use users. But they needed to do it to compete. This proves that AOL can't have a monopoly, and there is still competition in the ISP market place.
Your comments regarding Time Warner are correct, but only because it's a govt-approved monopoly, one that is changing. TW no longer runs Road Runner, it's run my MediaOne. MediaOne is if not Linux supportive, at least Linux friendly. I've been using MediaOne with Linux for two years with no problems at all. Even so, you can still get DSL (theoretically) from a number of sources.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Fortune favors the bold. -Virgil
[*duck*]
-Legion
Still I'd like to plot a little semi-paranoid scenario here:
TW starts producing content in a proprietary encoded format that uses some form of micro payment method. New versions of Netscape (AOL) supports this.
Meanwhile, Microsoft splits off its internet part (forced by the DoJ) which merges with some other content producer (say FOX). This MicroFox company does the same as TW/AOL.
Now if Joe Public gets a nice broadband access to the web. Only, it is not the same old web. Priorities goes to shopping malls, Ricki-Lake-on-the-web and other approved sites. No way any independent sites makes the way onto Joes screen. BTW there is no URL-fields in the browser anymore, Too hard to use. Joe can get everything he "wants" from the AOL/TW or MicroFox portal.
What about open source? What about Mozilla? Lynx etc?
Sure you can use any browser but if you want access to TW material you must use an approved one. (remember DVD). Slashdot sites will still exist (with first posts:) but Joe and Jane Public will never find it. (or anything else outside main stream)
Paranoid? Maybe.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Microsoft got their ass handed to them on a plate yesterday. And you think this was a bad thing? Hardly.
I'm not sure that I totally agree, but I see why you might make that assertion. I'm now venturing into the land of opinion, but I believe that the current situation with regard to the ability to be heard is better thn it has ever been.
Back in 1955, how constrained was the right to be heard? The possible outlets were three(?) TV stations that relatively few had access to, radio, newspapers, and a few magazines (most of which we still see today-- Time, Life [funnily enough], The Economist, Newsweek, etc.).
No Internet. No cable TV (along with its incredible need for lots and lots of content leading to lots and lots of shows).
The power in those days was far more concentrated in the hands of a few editors/journalists than it is today. I went to school with a number of people who are in mainstream journalism right now, and through them I have met even more people in mainstream journalism (think CBS, WSJ, etc.). Practically to a man and woman, they believe that the press is less able to effectively bury a story than it was able to in the past. Why?-- the profusion of outlets for news.
From several of those folks, I have heard that it was common practice in the news rooms of 20 years ago to bury stories that were unflattering to the local politician, local entrepeneur, or other person somehow affiliated with the powers that be(TM) in the local area. This is now virtually impossible. Just in the print media, everyone has a "city paper" of some sort that is widely read and will scoop the big shots in town given the chance.
Beyond print, the Internet has freed new points of view and outlets to arise even while the big fish get bigger. /., the Drudge Report, Soccer Buzz-- all of these sites are new vehicles that are outside of the traditional media, but that are monitired and have created stories in the world that was hopelessly dominated by the traditional media.
The emergence of cable and satellite TV has created the same type of new outlets for points of view previously kept from the general public. Even without the protected "local access" channels, there are more points of view being spread about on channels 4-200 than there ever were by channels 1-3.
I think that people overreact to the types of things that Katz is raving about here because even the youn'uns among us buy into the old idea that there are 3 networks and everyone watches the news on those networks and therefore those networks have total control over the mind of America. This is mostly false, and becoming moreso with time. Viewership of the networks is falling-- even the revolutionary cable stations like CNN and TBS are losing viewership. This is because of audience fragmentation, which is likely to continue into the forseeable future (which may be only 18 months-- I'm no seer). One of the reasons that the TW/AOL deal is big is that it becomes a one-stop-shop for advertisers looking to buy advertising time in many different segments of the population and across different media.
Despite your misgivings, I think that the genie is out of the bottle, and that it would be impossible for any one commercial entity to squelch free speech at all in the United States of today. There are simply too many ways for people to route around media censorship. I think that the ability to be heard is greater than it has ever been in the U.S., and I imagine that it will continue to become more robust.
Ironically, it threatens to further pressure Microsoft, whose bumbling efforts to expand into new media now appear even more short-sighted and poorly-timed.
what? am i the only person who remembers that gates now has a stock photo service and has reportedly been purchasing the rights to digital content...
what we have here is white-gold, gates is microsoft, microsoft is gates... and assholes you would never vote for will be soon be altering copyright laws to suit "corporatist". kuma
Said it in the subject. Too bad I didn't know.
Okay, the following is kind of off-topic, but I want to connect to AOL (read, "the new empire") from my Linux box. There was one protocol hack posted up at foo.org (search freshmeat for AOL), but the page isn't there anymore. I downloaded the program while it was available, and it doesn't work but I probably am not using it the right way anyway. He did not comment his code at all (readme is one line with his name and e-mail).
So people, are there any AOL protocol hacks that are in active development? (I'm excluding the AIM clients; there are tons of them.)
Ken
Or maybe not. Maybe such a suggestion (or even the possibility raised by the AOL purchase) could get Local Access Providers (ie Baby Bells) to get up off their asses and roll out solid, reliable, friendly DSL implementations.
It is ironic that all the media covering this merger are focusing on the media aspect, where the real concern is the Time/Warner local cable access (as many other brilliant Slashdotters have pointed out.) There are plenty of media sources, and I don't think this merger has the possibility to control the spread of information.
bun-fhuinneog agam!
I don't support hurting AOL or Time warner, but the major media companies should be broken up for the good of the free press. The media here is becoming little more than a propaganda tool for the left, which is the dominant ideology among reporters and people like Ted Turner.
My first thought upon reading this article was: AOL needs to die! My second thought was that Jon Katz could make Mother Teresa sound evil cuz she didn't use Linux.
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ib
VDSL service is being tested in the Phoenix area. It provides 256k internet connection, and digital cable tv over phone lines. There is, of course, the distance-from-the-central-office limitation, but it still is an alternative to cable modems/tv.
"Reality is less than television."-Brian Oblivion
The decade of mergers seems to carry on quite fine into the 00's.
But the question begs to answer. Is there any other way to go? You are the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation. Suddenly, your two biggest competitors decide to merge. From your good and lofty position, you become dwarfed by a giant. What are your alternatives? Bigger is better, a truism that applies too perfectly to the business world.
A real life example. Alcan of Canada, Picheney and a Swiss Aluminum co. (can't remember the name), decided to merge last year, creating the biggest Alumnimum consortium, topping Alcoa, of the US.
What did Alcoa do? Accept their fate smiling? No, they first approached Reynolds, and tried to buy it out through the management. When that didn't work, they went hostile, and bought them out through their shareholders. Add Reynolds to Alcoa, and they again become tops, over Alcan.
It might seem like an everending spiral. If your competitors become bigger, you need to become bigger, or you might be their next buyout target.
Inevitably, it will lead to giant corporations with tentacular holds on every aspect of commercialization and product. While this AOL/Time-Warner merger seems more like a buyout of AOL by Time (kinda like Daimler and Chrysler), it nonetheless creates the premier player in this new age of the media.
And while AOL and Time had similar business views and aims, it will not be long before we see mergers between corps that have nothing to do with each other, giving rise to that biggest invention of the cyberpunk writers, the megacorps.
Is AOL/Time bad? It might be. Should it be blocked?
America, land of Opportunity. If your only way to compete against bigger giants is to become one of them, who here is able to block your move? It's all in the interest of competition, sadly. Single-minded, smallish corps in big markets will, unfortunatly, not survive in the wake of the New Behemoths.
Merge or die.
Vodafone wants Mannesmann, but Mannesmann is not giving in. For the stockholders it is not a smart deal to sell to Vodafone now, because of the growth potential of Mannesmann. Espescially when they spin-off their non-wireless divisions. Gains from those non-wireless divisions will make Mannesmann catapult and their stocks soar. A takeover by Vodafone would not give such benefits.
Use Adsense for Charity
It's really quite a nice dream...come...dream with me. Release the caps-lock key.
Didnt I see this exact same plot in a Bond Movie? :) On the serious side though, I recomend that anyone who is worried about giant media corporations read an old book, "The Media Monopoly" by Ben Bagdikian (not sure of the spelling). It is a bit out of date but the points he makes about the dangers of media conglomoration are MORE relevant today than when he wrote it. NetNews may be the only thing that prevents news as a whole from turning into sesationalist commercial for whatever faceless giant is pulling the strings of their parent company. www.rain.org/~openmind/bagrevu.htm for a review of the book. Interestingly a Google search on "the media monopoly" turns up Microsoft's home page as its first entry :)
-- Hail Eris
Good article, but it's not going to be that bad. There will always be options for any given service. Examples:
- Wal-Mart. I could go to another monolith, like Big K, or I could shop local, or I could *gasp* go online.
- Blockbuster Video. Again, another monolith (West Coast Video/Hollywood Video), shop local or get it online.
- Staples. OfficeMax, local, online.
- Toys R Us. K-B Toys, local, online.
- Starbucks. Who needs coffee when I have Pepsi? Besides, there is no "family" at a Starbucks like there is at a local cafe. =)
For the purpose of getting products, it is almost impossible for there to be a monopoly. The only "product monopoly" AOL/Time Warner will have is over the products they create themselves. Don't they deserve that? If you want CNN, you gotta get it from them.Now when it comes to "service monopoly," or how people get online and what they have access to when they get there -- do you honestly believe that AT+T (with MediaOne, etc.) will lie down? That Bell Atlantic won't continue to push DSL down my throat up here in Boston? That local dial-up, in one form or another, won't continue to exist many years from now?
WARNING: This might be a .sig
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
...you have not yet felt the awesome power of the AOL mind control laser. Here's what a household looks like when it has been hit. Little Johnny has Netscape open and is at the CNN site doing his homework whilst logged in to AOL on his cable modem. Sister Suzie is in her room watching the DVD version of Warner Bros. "You've Got Mail". Mom is watching TV, which is of course connected to cable. Dad, who never talks to any of them sits there "reading" the SI swimsuit edition. Lovely no? By God, if you can't see this merger as a collosal threat, you're probably unable to see at all. Mb Katz is a wee bit melodramatic, but IMO it's no big deal to be that way to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. That being, we are about to witness the birth of the biggest media shop vac the world has ever known.
the point that katz (worry not, i'm not a big fan of him either) is trying to make here is that this merger is allowing the new AOL/Time-Warner to control all aspects of the media today for a large number of people...
the people who use AOL are mostly newbies... those newbies are not going to go out of their way and read slashdot religiously for hours a day or regularly read several different news services... they're going to log onto AOL and read the news page or flip on their tv and watch CNN.
if the AOL/Time-Warner merger works out, that means that a significant fraction of the (american) internet population (sorry, don't know any exact figures) is seeing the same news as the significant portion of the non-connected population that watches just CNN or other Time-Warner media.
in and of itself, this is not a bad thing... but both of these companies, despite CNN's supposed journalistic integrity, have a reputation for being heavy-handed and interested only in the bottom line. the merger with AOL is adding even more to Time-Warner's already significant political clout... imagine what the media blitz would be like if Ted Turner decided to flex his bank account and run for office.
the entire deal just stinks of evil...
I had an AOL account, for the duration of the free trial month, in order to test a web application on the AOL browser. The application kept breaking because AOL would not address the bugs its browser had - yes, I contacted them directly to give them bug reports - so I continued to receive complaints from AOL users. I told them to complain to AOL but nothing changed. There are many websites that have to maintain separate pages because AOL will not adhere to any quality standards in their product. That's my most compelling reason for hating them. Then there's the fact that the very nature of their service, sequestering their subscribers in a contained and antiseptic environment, is the very antithesis of the internet.
As for Time Warner, there's not much to say. They're just a whorehouse, pimping shoddy and sensationalist "journalism." AOL already uses much of Time Warner's media so there is no gain in content access unless Time Warner decides to restrict their content to AOL.
AOL and Time Warner, 2 tasteless companies that have less taste together.
- tokengeekgrrl
AOL users would get high-speed access to a content-controlled portal. AOL/Time-Warner can then force users not only to subscribe to broadband access but also to seize control of delivery of the content in an unprecedented way. Sort of your one-stop window to the world(TM).
This bodes poorly for netizens getting entertainment in general. Hey, wanna watch that episode of Gilligan's Island where his molar becomes a radio? That will be $4.99 plus tax plus access fee plus Internet surcharge, please. AOL/Time-Warner is to your computer like Blockbuster is for your VCR. (Still doesn't explain why the entertainment industry is shooting themselves in the foot over DVD.)
My guess is that things will go the way of satellite dishes: linux users can have their own software and OS, but they will eventually have to pay to join the rest of the world. If this makes sense, then I would like to see the gov't at least make AOL/Time-Warner fund free ISPs.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Well, this article shows how much americans think that they are the only country in the world. There is no AOL outside states, Warner has no influence in Europe. And ask anyone outside US if they will even talk with anyone connected to AOL. Although for US it can be yet another restriction to even so poor freedom. But I don't think that after all these feminism/racism affairs, Big Brother paranoia and permanent brainwashing of US content providers and government there can be still some credit of US as a country of free speach and free thinking.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
> Your giving the average consumer too much credit. The average aol user is not that hip, and they will not even know that they are being subjected to the control of Big Brother. Don't assume that the average schmoe has a clue just because you do.
But there's the difference... with Microsoft, even those who do have a clue, don't have a choice. Sure, they have a limited choice, they can use whatever operating system they want, but if they're developing for a corporate world, guess what they need to use, unless they want their market restricted to a fraction of the possibility. That's Microshaft's monopoly. In the home world, M$ controls the people who don't (yet) know enough to make their own decisions, or maintain a Linux OS, and so on. M$ has that market too.
TW/AOL can never control all our choices unless they go out and rid all the competition ala M$. It's the type of market. People who know better can easily choose anything other than AOL, and personally, I don't care who owns the TV station I watch. People who don't know, well, they'll grab AOL because it's much less hassle for them. But nothing says they HAVE to use AOL. It's still their choice.
I think it basically comes down to whether or not people who know what they're doing have a choice as to the matter. If not, they're basically forced to utilize one product/service, and the monopoly. Someone else mentioned that TW/AOL was a vertical monopoloy - they're not a road block to our destination, we can still detour around it because the other routes still exist.
Aye, there's the rub.
> Unless you get your content through a TW cable franchise. Admittedly theoretical: what if every email you sent out started having an advertisement for the latest Time-Life video attached to the bottom of it...
I don't think they would get that bad. The reason why Microsoft is under so much heat is because of the way they handled being a monopoly. Being a monopoly wasn't the point, it was their attitude at being and becoming that monopoly.
I don't see TW/AOL imposing restrictions where possible, or imposing hinderances or annoying little things. In doing so, they'd lose a lot of their market simply because the market wouldn't like it, and because there are still many many other media and ISP companies, people would still have the choice. Now if TW/AOL went out and purposely eliminated that competition, THEN it would be considered a hazard. I don't think the TW/AOL merger is a bad thing. They can work together to try and bring some better products to the public via media and internet. If you're lucky enough to receive any major service from them, you may notice some differences, but I don't think it'll be anything that would turn away any customers. BUT, we'll find out sooner or later if their attitude after merging eventually mimics Microshaft...
Bottom line: look forward to some improvements, but be wary of their methods of growth.
OK, I'm a Katz basher, so I'll take a shot at answering.
Katz consistently posts emotive, inflammatory, nearly content-free fluff. He'll go on and on about whatever cause he's promoting (invariably anti-business), getting people riled up but without actually saying anything. This is activism, not journalism. This article is a prime example; he fails to grasp either the meaning or the mechanics of anti-trust law, but has decided that since the AOL/Time-Warner merger is really big, they should be stopped by virtue of being a monopoly. That's not how it works.
The there's the issue that his articles are much longer than they should be for the points he's trying to make. His writing style is excessively wordy.
Finally, the crux of the matter; JonKatz is (technically speaking) a professional journalist. He gets paid to be a journalist, and so should be held to a higher standard than, for instance, a bunch of geeks who run a "news for nerds" website. In reality, he's not reaching their standard.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Gee, JonKatz gets to hobnob (and not just that, but be ASKED FOR COMMENTS BY!!!) ABC and the Boston Globe. How exciting! How worthy he is, and how unworthy the rest of us poor plebians are to grovel at his feet.
/. bothers with JonKatz, except maybe for the comic relief.
Oh, and there was some other, less important stuff about corporate mergers and so forth.
Once again, the guy just doesn't get it. He doesn't understand US monopoly law, and doesn't even understand what a monopoly is. If you happen to be reading this Jon, repeat after me: A monopoly isn't just a very large company. Ever looked at who owns NBC? I'll give you a hint: They're now known as MSNBC. Other media? Oh, I'm sure there are one or two stations around that people watch. (and similarly with online content providers)
I don't like this merger. However, calling it a monopoly is just stupid, and suggesting that monopolies are illegal is really REALLY stupid! Once again, I wonder why
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK, thanks for the clarification. The point still remains, though, that there's a substantial chunk of competition for the new merger.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The United States may have been the birthplace of a free and independent press, but...
Nneeeppp ! Wrong.
The tradition of the democratic free press owes a lot more to England, France etc than the US. And in my experience, fleet street continues to be a lot richer in this 'free' and 'independent' tradition than the jingoistic, self-focused CNN-style Propaganda I saw in the US!
Don't believe your own hype.
PS - I am a NZ'r (not English)
People like him actually destroy values. It's my job to find these people and weed them out.
"So, run off back to your Windows box."
Ha! That's really funny :) What's even more funny is that I used to run Linux as a client, and I really enjoyed it. The problem was it didn't have all the tools and applications I need to do my job, so I switched back to Windows.
Sure, I have to reboot 3 times a day, but I least I can run my favorite apps.
Steve Case has broached the limits of a free market economy? Give me an extrra-large break, will you? Steve Case has brought the Internet into the homes of millions of Americans who would have otherwise be essentially shut out. Admittedly, AOL leaves much to be desired, but that's the whole point: We have a choice not to use them.
History is filled with liberal-minded, anti-competitve journalists like you Jon. Remember Ida Tarbell and her absolute ridicule of John Rockefeller? Hmm...something sounds familiar.
"The corporate move to acquire information, online and off, is a civic and an Internet menace." What the hell does this mean, Jon? Is there something wrong with "aquiring" information? Please...
"There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore..." Well, then get off your butt and create one. I'm sure Steve Case didn't sit at home complaining about how there was no easy way for Americans to get connected to the Internet. He got off his ass and did it, and now he is being vilified for doing so.
"Wal-Mart, Blockbuster Video, Staples, Toys R Us, Starbucks, Disney and now, AOL/Time-Warner, rule our world." Ironically, you're last statement is the one that strikes the most happiness and hope in my heart. Big business and competitive enterprise are allowed to grow free in our country. This has led to values that were almost unthinkable decades ago. People today live like kings compared to people of the 18th and 19th century. Business super-heros like Sam Walton, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Steve Case, Bill Gates, and Michael Milken have created values where non previously existed, have expanded the quality of life and have brought prosperity and happiness to our great country.
Take your anti-competitive psuedo-journalism and stick it, Katz.
Is there some definitive list of all the companies and such that are controlled by T-W/AOL? I understand, of course, that T-W was huge, but I think a lot of us would gain a real understanding of what the merger means if we can see what is all under one control now. Thanks in advance for any pointers and stuff.
It's the power that AOL/TW could have in the future. Time Warner by itself is a huge media company. TW provides me with my cable tv service and my cable internet service. TW owns magazines with millions of subscribers such as Sports Illistrated and Time. TW also owns big book publishing companies. And now TW has access to AOL's 20 million customers and their personal data. AOL now has the same access to TW's customers. That is a whole lot of easy and free advertising. AOL/TW is in a position to increase their market share by a lot. The merger doesn't give them the power to crush competition right now but what about a few years down the road after they've capitalized on their advantage?
tci (@home, t-w, microsoft, compaq) currently offer cable modem access in 38 cities, by the end of the year 39 more cities will have cable modem access. now that aol has merged with them i'm sure they will have even more funds to increase this number, so this should be good news to people that don't have cable in their area. this will seem bad to users that already have cable, because now aol will probably start putting users on cable and the idea of losing bandwidth comes into play.
as for wanting to hook up the service to a linux box, that is fine. tci will install the network card or give it to you to install yourself and then its just a matter of starting dhcpcd to get an ip address. tci however does not support anything but win 95,98, nt and mac os 8. there was a problem with not being able to login without one of the supported o/s's but they have already removed the login program in about half the cities and currently working on getting rid of it in the rest so that you can use the o/s of your choice, just don't call and ask for help.
as for static ip's and running a web server under the roadrunner service they're not available to the home user, but that is what the roadrunner pro service is for. its targetted mainly at businesses and expect to pay a little more a month and you can have your static ip's and run any server. @home actually provides static ip addresses in most areas and if you want to run a server that is what the @work service is for.
as for having no alternatives, your incorrect again, *dsl is moving quickly across the country as alternative to cable. if you have a satelite you can get directpc service. theres also isdn or get a t1.
i currently have roadrunner and i'm kinda nervous that aol users may get on and eat away at my bandwidth but i don't think this is going to happen, tci is real good about increasing their line to the backbone to accomodate more users. i think most people are just afraid of the letters "aol." if you don't have cable modems in your area i'm sure this will be exciting news.
Regardless of whether you care what AOL 'luzers' see, it is an extremely dangerous prospect; one enormous company conrolling what is seen by such a large population of the internet community. Regardless of whether they are 'luzers', infulencing them is still influencing a large part of the internet community. If these, so called, 'luzers' take most of what they see on AOL for granted and don't take the initiative to find other information or choose to disagree, this gives AOL Time/Warner the power to influence far to many people by simply having content in the right place and saying what they want. We simply cannot allow such a huge organization to control media over such a large group of people.
He who controls the past, commands the future... He who controls the future conquers the past.
If Microsoft turns out to be guilty of anti-trust violations for seeking to dominate the Web browser market and discouraging innovation and competition, then the Time-Warner-AOL merger seems dramatically more serious in its potential consequences, not only for consumers but for a competitive new media environment. In fact, the accusations against Microsoft seem trivial when weighed against the impact of the mega-merger announced yesterday.
How can you compare the actual, malicious anti-competitive practices of Microsoft as a monopoly to those of a large media company with no monopoly in place that has not engaged in any visible anti-competitive acts?
AOL Time Warner does not compare to Microsoft. Microsoft owns the consumer desktop operating system market. It uses that monopoly to extort its customers and gain influence in other markets. AOL Time Warner, on the other hand, owns a full media chain from content creation, to publication, to distribution. It does not own any single portion of that chain.
Think of it in terms of legos. Imagine there are enough legos of different shapes in the world to build 5 fire stations. AOL Time Warner has simply positioned themselves as owners of all the different shapes required to build one fire station. They do not prevent anyone else from building fire stations. Others may encounter greaters costs at building a fire station, since they do not control in themselves all of the requisite shapes, but they can still do it.
Microsoft, on the other hand, controls all of the wheel pieces. This means no one can build the fire truck for the station without going through Microsoft. If Microsoft does not want to let you build a fire station, then you cannot build one.
Which one looks more troublesome to you? Unless AOL Time Warner comes to control all of a specific segment of the media chain, which they do not, I see absolutely no problem with the merger. In fact, I think it is a good thing because it will speed the rollout of broadband (phone companies will FINALLY have to get their shit together if they want to compete). It will also speed innovation on the confluence of new media and old. Those are good things.
I wouldn't exactly call the popular vote a "sham". True you don't get to vote on the electoral college electors directly, but (unless I have majorly confused my facts), the candidate who won the popular vote has always been elected president. While the margin of victory is usually much higher in the electoral college, the result is the same. However, this then makes the electoral college uterly useless, which is *my* reason for wanting to see it go away :)
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Since when does AOL and Time Warner have "half the internets" population? Are you mathematically challenged or just stupid? Most reports on the Internet show it to have around 300 million users. Now compare this with the huge (and yet piddly in comparison to the total) number of users that would be controlled by this merger (like 20 million is what I've seen estimated) and I think we are a far cry from monopoly/world domination. This is much less of a threat than the real scary merger of the last few months, Sprint and MCI. These companies provide basic services to many many more users than AOL.
Time Warner owns a significant cable market share. Broadband is the future and AOL wants to control the pipe. Right now, of course, AOL is trying to act nice...but given half the chance they will force people who want broadband to take AOL or accept second rate service from a disfavored ISP. Content + Delivery is a bad combination in these days of merger madness.
So much of what I see here is people that personally don't like AOL. So what? That doesn't mean the end of the world. Not even close to it. Many people are totally happy with the services that AOL provides. I have my own pet peeves about AOL, oh well. The AOL/Time Warner could be a good or bad thing. Only time will tell.
The post made by LizardKing titled Media Monopoly Time... said: I wonder how much of the Western world's media is now concentrated into the hands of Time/Warner and News International. Forget monopolies based on commodities(Microsoft, etc), domination of information dissemination is the *really* scary prospect.
I find this interesting. Honestly though, I've lost faith in most of the media. Recently in Puyallup, Washington there was a problem with "massive racial hatred" in one of the local high schools. That was according to The News Tribune (for Tacoma), and several other TV news stations. According to the media that high school was one of the "top 10 most racial schools in America." Bull. I had several friends who had quite the opposite story of what happened. They were there to see it happen. So, either my friends who saw the events at that high school are lying, or the media is getting the story wrong. I truely have lost faith in most of the media.
The homogenization of the media was started under the Reagan Revolution of the Eighties. Remember the elimination of the Equal Time provisions for broadcasters? The removal of the limit of the number of outlets a single individual or corporation could own? This was hailed as victories for free speech. Inevitably, the free market will permit the most powerful or most politically motivated (there is a difference) to eat all the magazines, TV networks, radio stations, newspapers and new internet media companies in the US. The money generated will also enable the purchase of non-US assets, creating a world-wide monopoly set. One, two, or three companies will remain, almost certainly opposed to unions, liberals, government controls of any sort. And we all watched as it happened. The time to protest was when the deregulation occured. The conglomerates are too powerful now to stop. You wanted a totally free market? Well, you got it. Congrats. Total freedom for the richest is near-slavery for the poorest. I'm a libertarian, and even I understand this. Government is necessary. Here's another point: this is not a monopoly today - not the way Microsoft is. If Microsoft had won the Internet, they not only would own AOL and Time-Warner, but due to the utter control of the OS and hardware would have shut every other competitor out of the market. Game would have been REALLY over.
- Doing things better than others is fine; but that has not prevented the large uns from queezing out the smaller ones who may be just as good
- mergers will stop when enough people have been fired after mergers to create real pressure groups to stop the madness. Imagine a situation where twenty percent of the working population become jobless as a result of mergers and start calling their congressmen...
Are you sure?
.oO0Oo.
Last I saw the printing press was invented in Europe and used to break the grip of Catholisism.
That was in the 17th century
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
hehe
.oO0Oo.
makes my point even truer !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
AOL and Time-Warner wouldn't just be creating another media company, but an information nation. This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth.
This guy is really talking out of his ass. Cultural influence? My sister, my parents and my uncle use AOL. It is pretty sad, because I hate AOL. But I put all of them on AOL. Why? Because being totally computer illiterate, that is all they can handle. They use it maybe a couple times a day to check stocks, etc. This is hardly what I would call a culture. They really don't know what the fuck to do with it. If I don't set a web site to their "favorites", they'll never find it again. AOL is hardly creating a culture, expect maybe a culture of morons and computer illiterate people or maybe in the end, a culture of people that hate AOL
Something very odd about this whole affair is the way you "linux/open source people" look upon everything.
... and learn from it.
... and the news item is already all the publicity among the target group (=you) they could wish for. All of you, struck with blindness, will flock to IBM's banner. Ha!, how I(BM) would drive the hosts of Mordor...no, wait ... Microsoft. Do I need to continue ?) ..." heck WHAT ? Don't forget your roots ! (and Axel Springer ;)
... then you become one of them, one among the free kindred, one of the good linux people, right ? "Oh yea, you're using Linux and already that alone validates you." That's a whole lot better than making up your own opinion and saving democracy the right way ... but whom do I try to convert ? The two party country. Alas! ... sorry, I slipped off ;) (never mind that paragraph)
... some call it computer.
... whose name does not matter
Let's say Microsoft/IBM/AOL-TimeWarner are trying to embrace the darkness, whilst you on other hand tend to enjoy the light. Now, you might be initially led to believe: "Oh yea, darkness is evil, so we are the good guys."
Wrong.
You are just one side and Microsoft is the other,
and in between you find an infinite number of shades of grey. Shades of Grey ? Infinite points of view ! And they are all equal.
If 90 persons say: AOL is great, and 10 alone say: They suck. Who's now right and who is wrong ?
The dumb majority ? The cleverer minority ? No, both.
The next thing is: If you don't like the AOL-TimeWarner-thing, then don't get an account there, don't use ICQ, don't enjoy their content. In the "beginning" you felt limited by Microsoft's weak OS and none of the Unixes fitted your desire of "freedom", so you made up your own OS: Linux.
Fling "So what !" right into the teeth of fate. You can always make up your own thing. However, you must not tell the other 6 billion people on this planet, what they have to like and what not. This is not an evil plague sweeping over the world, and sometimes time does tend to take a different path as everyone expected. No one can foresee the future, but if you care about it, don't mourn, do something.
You (all that contributed code) are very proud and are damn right feeling so. However, just because you made up your own thing, doesn't mean you have found the ultimate. The really clever way would be to recognize both faults and advantages of both you and the "enemy"
BTW: Katz: The true free enterprise - the belief that the market regulates itself through offer and demand - has fallen into oblivion, when the first commercials appeared on tv, so don't mourn about a lost "American" dream. (Commercials/Ads do manipulate demand at will nowadays)
And, IBM is not embracing "open source" but "linux" (a hype). Why ? Hey, no need to write drivers or application code, just have the specs and the open source movement will do it for you. (and they sell the service, the hardware
"The United States may have been the birthplace of a free and independent press
And I don't even want to guess, how soon already every one of you agreed with Jon Katz, even if you didn't finish reading his comment, because
Closingly, a warning: Don`t reply: "Is you father a microsoft employee ?" Or I tell your mommy that you must not spend hours after hours in front of that hot thing obviously melting away your brain and wits
CU
---
End Of Message "Shouldn't have taken the blue pill
-- There are literally dozens of radio staions in virtually every US market.
I heard Sunday on KALX in Berkeley CA that 95% of commercial radio stations are owned by 5 companies. Of those 5, I wonder how many are owned by TimeWarner?
Of course, this is taken with a grain of salt, coming as it does from the People's Republic of Berkeley.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
You better get a patent on that idea, before it becomes IP of TW/AOL because it traveled thru architecture they own...
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
And after all of that, I still think I hate it.
--Colbey
Well, this is a bit off topic, but neither the AOL sheep or the rest of us elect the President of the United States. The Electoral College elects the President. Who are they? Beats me. I never voted for an "Electoral College Representative." The popular vote is a sham, especially today when tallying a popular vote *is* possible, and on election day. Your vote doesnt mean squat for the Prez elections. As far as there being many venues of info, sure for those of us who have the desire to do our own research and come to our own conclusions. But the average person is content to turn on CNN or the nightly network news station, or read TIME, or what have you. Guess what, those venues are owned by 3 companies. Most people believe what they see on TV.....
Well, that's it for me. All further articles from Katz get filtered... For crying out loud. This guy is a dooms day prophet. Bill Gates could sneeze and he'd proclaim a viral infection for 3 states.
Connah
Connah
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for this change to take effect."
Staples, Wal Mart, etc. are not monopolies. Linux/AOl Time Warner on the same day are of Biblical proportions? Come on Katz, no one's going to believe that.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
ok, well, i hate AOL because it allows even the non-techy of ppl to get online, some think this is good, it's fine with me until they start going onto all of the good chat places and most of them cannot speak an entire sentence correctly, that's why it's not good for some non-techies to get online, of course there are some ppl out there who like AOL and don't do these kinds of things, but there are alot of ppl using AOL who really lack in the area of computer knowledge and the internet in general, how many ppl have actually used AOL? i've used it, u go into a chat room once, u get tossed onto TONS of mailing lists, i went onto a chat room more than a year ago, haven't gone back, still get spam from these mailing lists, there's too many annoying things with AOL, for one u can't use it on linux, because there isn't enough demand for it, of course, only reason i would use AOL from linux is because i wouldn't be paying for it anyways, i'd never pay for something as crappy as AOL.
Unfortunately, this is worst than facism. Its corporate imperialism - worse because as corporations become more global, local and national governments can no longer keep corporations accountable for their actions.
Check out _When Corp. Rule the World_ by former HBS prof. David Korten. He gives a hauntingly insightful description of what this lack of accountability already allows.
Not too sound too "doomesday"-ish myself, but doesn't receiving our information/news from limited sources sound a bit too close to Newspeak :>
Of course, there is a remedy. Support and sponsor alternatives, or think of them your own. I truly think there is a large correlation between the unimaginable size corporations have become and the quickly growing amount of entrepreneurs in the country.
Seth
So two of the largest purveyors of homogenized pablum "information" have merged. So what? Synergistic homogenized pablum? Fewer options for consumers looking for celeberty profiles and books about cats?
The cost of making one's own "content" availible to the entire world has never been lower. AOL and Time can continue delivering pablum to those who want it. For those who don't, there has never been a greater forum.
In fairness, though, France has been having those sorts of riots on a regular basis for over 200 years now, under every form of government they've tried. I don't think European Socialism has any direct causal relationship in this instance.
I refuse, on principle, to have a
Good points. I really hope that this merger has no effect upon my current ISP, Road Runner. What will the effect of this merger be on my already limited BandWidth? Road Runner here in San Diego county has already begun to place caps on the upload throughput, dispite releases that they have not done so. Will my BandWidth be cut even further down, perhaps to accomodate millions of IM's? Will customers that pay that extortionant amount for AOL get preferred service versus those of us who don't care for the great 'content' AOL provides? Are there are to be changes made, such as a login that AOL requires or will I have to have screen name just to access the internet? Answers to these questions are what RR customers are looking for but not finding. I really hope this merger does not have any effect upon the regular Road Runner service but only time will tell.
..."I don't see how controlling the minds of these sheep can be of any consequence" I work at a ISP helpdesk on a college campus, so I deal with people of all levels of computer knowledge. What makes this interesting, is that the call I got before reading this article was by the head of the Chemistry department. He's a Harvard graduate, but he can't get his Macintosh online. Are you saying that because you know how dial up networking works, you are somehow more intelligent than him? What if he told his students that they were 'lusers' and 'sheep' because they don't know anything about Organic Chemistry? ..."Guess I'm in the other half" Or are you saying that you're the half of the population who isn't affected by advertising? What kind of soda did you drink today? What kind of car were you in last week? What brand name clothing do you own? C'mon, its absurd to think that you're in such a lofty position that advertising won't affect you. ..."I don't see how controlling the minds of these sheep can be of any consequence." These 'sheep' are also your family, your friends, your professors and coworkers. They're also the voting majority in the United States and the masses that dictate what products and services are available. Instead of belittling them, why don't you consider working with them and helping them so that they can make educated decisions instead of being swayed by some conglomerate? If you really supported the open source movement, or individual freedom, you would see this as a possible infringement on that and act accordingly.
I find it very strange that this happens just as I've picked up Shadowrun: Third Edition. The Net to a great number of people in this country is AOL. I loathe AOL. Almost anyone I know dislikes AOL. People who cannot really use computers (like my parents) use AOL because "It's easy".
Of course, these are the same people who read Time, People, and watch CNN for their news. Yes, easy-to-use, no control, no real content news.
Does anyone see a pattern?
I read BBC News, The Scotsman, etc. I can't wait for BBC World to come to the US in the spring.
Oh well, screw the masses. That's why they pay us so much. Because we can do what they never will.
------
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
I appreciate StarBucks(tm) for giving me the choice to decide at what block I decide to stop for StarBucks(tm) coffee. I can even decide if I want to cross the street, because there is one on the other side of the street. And, if I go to a mall, I have the choice of what mall floor I want to get coffee at!! I just wish I could smush StarBucks(tm) and Mcdonalds(tm)together. I would put them at every third block...then I would have real choices..
I feel stepped on after an announcement like that. Do you think this nation has enough passion left to get up off our asses and actually fight back against something like this? I'm moving to Canada. Go Linux. The loneliest underpenguin.
BTW, I'm currently forced to use an AOL account. It is not only completely and disgustingly restricted, its difficult to actually get onto the WWW. Many AOL'ers think that when they are online they are connected to the net, but infact they are being force-fed AOL biased info. I fear more media may end up this way...
Elendale (Is afraid, VERY afraid)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
I am currently forced to use AOL. I cannot hook up to the internet even through an ISP I pay for. AOL is in the buisiness of running lives. People everyday rely upon AOL info and only AOL info. TW is just expanding the playing field to offline content. It wouldn't be so bad, except that AOL's 'services' are lacking horribly. I run at 5K/sec when I should be getting much, much more (shotgun 56k)
Elendale (Sorry for the knee-jerk reaction, but it is deserved)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
The irony of this is not lost one me though--the same ideological gang that thinks it can engineer the past is the same one that thinks it can do the same to your's and mine future.
There is no "Bridge to the 21st Century" except the one they have cobbled together in their propaganda machines. The reality are the many worn footpaths of the dreamers, schemers, entrepreneurs and just plain hard workin' folk have made leading to the future.
Beware the technocrat--Don't believe the hype.
I think Jon's been reading too much of the good judge's findings; the real world is not quite so static. The idea that one source could control the flow of information today is equally laughable. You don't get more customers by limiting their options, unless of course, that's exactly what they want.
There are too many alternative and competing sources of information for this to be a credible theory. Slashdot is a perfect example of an alternative source and is only one of dozens that I utilize daily to get my info, on and off the Net. There is nothing that promises that this will be successful or lasting. Each party could tire of one another soon enough and this will only be so much wasted energy.
You can engineer the future no more so than you can the past.
I don't neccessarily think of this merger as a bad thing, yet. We'll have to see. I read through tons of these comments and mostly every one talks about it in terms of what AOL is now going to. What I'm waiting to here is what is TimeWarner going to do. They are obviously in it to gain something also. I see it as now TimeWarner now has a bigger portal to the interenet populous. Don't forget the other side of the fact. YZ
F. AOL and F. Time Warner
A decent Network is finally here.
They already own cnn. Why do you think it's such a big deal, and why the hell would they want to buy redhat or corel? AOL doesn't provide service Linux users. As for microsoft, well, lets try to take over the market before they get broken up if you are realy woried about that.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
The AOL-T/W merger simply represents a centralization of the shepherds, making it easier for them to round up the herd. Since there are already so many herd-dwellers around, things won't change much. Those of us who strive to overcome the herd and escape it won't be affected at all, unless the shepherds begin restricting access to our information.
Look at the reactions to this event: business herd-dwellers point at how profitable this could be. Those of us outside the herd point out how much stronger the herd will be, and how much more difficult it will be for herd-dwellers to escape it.
To understand the effect mass media has on society, try unplugging your television for 6 months. Stop listening to commercial radio for 6 months. Don't read mainstream press for 6 months. A haze will be lifted, and you will see more clearly.
I myself have just scheduled a T/W cable-modem install this week, before this announcement. I will probably go ahead with it, simply because I don't have major servers to run and it does represent the best technology at the best price available to me. But this merger, if it imposes itself upon the spirit of free communication on the net by restricting the availability of technology to those who want it, will be A Bad Thing.
Get AOL and you get chatrooms filled with freaks and an endless barrage of spam and porn directed to your email account. Not to mention a KLUDGY gui.
;-)
As far as Time Warner goes - the service is ok but the quality and price is not (compared to other such services). Here in LA they have been promising cable modems for the last year and guess what, nothing yet.
And think about it - for AOL to get themselves into your livingroom they have to totally rethink their entire GUI system, because NOTHING about it fits the TV paradigm in any way. And we all know that this is the way they want to go - AOL-TV.
No thanks, count me out. Someone break this soon-to-be monopoly up already
this is actual fact. i've read about it in a variety of sources on the web. go check out fair.org and adbusters.org sometime.
Last I saw the printing press was invented in Europe and used to break the grip of Catholisism. That was in the 17th century The printing press was invented in the 1500's by the 1600's the churchs stranglehold on europe had been broken. The internet was invented in the late 1900's. Maybe in the 21st century it will break The Corporations stranglehold on the world.
and almost all of those channels are owned by 3 major corporations. you understand that there is not an independent media? or even a media operated by small corporations? almost everything you see on TV is the product of a small group of gian transnational corporations. the AOL Time Warner deal IS scary. It WAS one of the darkest days in the nets history.
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/flash1.html I don't think those are actually "riots" but are protests. Protests are part of a healthy functioning democracy where people have freedom to assemble. Remember the saying about democracy being an ugly messy thing? Well that is it. In America whenever there is a protest anywhere for some reason the corporate controlled media tries to turn it into a "riot", unless of course the protest goes along with the corporate agenda :)
Go to their web site. check the news. This (the news about IBM supporting linux) was an interview, with an employee of IBM (albeit a very high up in the ranks employee). Just thought it needed to be said...
Well, after a long journey... AOL get better and better.. even in my country does have AOL server, I believe there is a lot of fanatic user who always use AOL for their life time... Keep alive AOL
Stupid guyz!
I have a friend who asks me for advice on pc matters from time to time. His oldest kid armtwisted him into signing up for AOL (but it's free, Dad it's free for 100 whole hours!!). Then he started getting the bill.(hohoho) 45 dollars a month for Splatterball alone, not including the charge for basic AOL. He asked me about it. 5 minutes of searching on the web later, I found out that you can play Splatterball+ for unlimited minutes/hours for 9.99 a month (from the company that created the game). Why do people hate AOL? well devious pricegouging is one good reason. An even better reason is that many of us AOL-haters know very well that Steve Case has not given up his dream of subverting the Internet and converting it to his private toll-road (the way aol and compuserve were before the www made the Internet popular). The dumbed-down AOL interface hides the resources of the Internet from its vic^H^H^users preventing them from knowing what their really connected to when they access some interesting content pushed their way by AOL. The result is --remember that these are generally kids and people with the mental capacity of children-- that they believe the stuff BELONGS to AOL. AOL must have created it for them (!). This is fundamentally misrepresentation, and leads to users being unaware of existence of a market for the services accessed which leads,in turn, to massive overcharging for these services. Meanwhile AOl remains antagonistic to the open character and tradition of the internet and web, and this hostility begins right at the user's PC: AOL subtracts from the freedom of users to use software of their choosing --from applications to operating systems-- when accessing the Internet through their AOL dialup connections. And it keeps them stupid and in a state of infantile dependence on the AOL interface. You will use AOL keywords! we control the vertical, we control the horizontal, we control the language you use to navigate and negotiate your way on the web.You will use the web our way and if you want to learn other programs, we've already put up every roadblock imaginable --so forget about it. AOl users never "grow up" in terms of their skills; take away AOL and their helpless as babies sucking their thumbs and crying with rage against interfaces as "user-hostile" as Netscape, InternetExplorer and Yahoo. The restrictions of the AOL interface prevent them from learning adaptation, whereas the standard tools and standard ISP's do not restrict the users experimentations, so they learn as they try different things to see if it suits them.
The more people sign on to this company, AOL --I don't really know what you'd call it, you can't really call it an ISP; they restrict more service than they provide-- the more pervasive becomes the lie that AOL is the Internet, an ISP like any other, the more accepted general online imbecility becomes, and the deeper AOL's shadow over online content providers and standards becomes. And the fewer people there are remaining who understand that freedom of everyone online is being threatened by an alien and essentially hostile parasite.
Bottom line: AOL is for losers who're too stupid to know better, or the criminally irresponsible who don't care.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
The problem with the media is not the media. The problem is capitalism. These companies are going to do whatever it takes to become more profitable. what it means is usually not good for consumers. The fact of the matter is advertisers and marketing people basically brainwash the general populas. What needs to happen is that media companies should be given autonomy from their parent companies. There should be real legal ramifications for parent companies who control what is said in their various information outlets. The other alternative as I see it is to scrap the current form of capitalism as we have it. First order of business is to reinstitute the anti-trust laws the Reagan administration got rid of. Bad things usually happen when a whole bunch of people just want to make more money.
John Katz obviously doesnot like the merger, but he seems to forget one simple fact...
If you dont like AOL, dont use it. If you dont like the watered down news coming out of Time-Warner, dont read it. As long as there are alternatives, theres no problem. Mergers are one of the natural results of capitialism.
Monopolies only exist where there no alternative to one's companies products, or where unfair business practices are used.
Microsoft is far more of a monoploy than AOL-Time.
Why? Fewer alternatives.
OS/2? Good OS?, but no support.
Macintosh? Fine, if you want to buy a new machine.
Linux? In time, yes. Right now, its just not major league. (Asbestos suit put on- im sorry but when more hardware works, and when more software is available, sure.)
Microsoft also has a proven track record for squashing competition and doing other nefarious business practices.
With AOL-Time, you dont have to use them.
I dont use AOL, havenot for many many moons.
I happen to like CNN, but if they start to suck, I can go to any number of sites for alternatives. (Not that it really matters, 95% of all news comes from Associated Press or Reuters).
Bottom line, we still have choices. Excerice your right to make them.
-- A Human Being is nothing more than mobile CO2 factory. Bow to the plants.
the point: this merger is a bad idea not because of the direct consequences it will have (although they will be extremely less than ideal) but because of the precident it sets for how large and powerful a company we are willing to let exist. as companies like this get bigger and bigger, it won't be long until the three or four media conglomerates left decide that it's in thier best interest (read: that it will make them more money, not that it will allow them to do what they do better) to join forces, even informally. . . .bad news. some of the earlier posts have covered the impact of conglomerated media pretty well, so you get the picture. . .
."
"and you can feign ignorance, but you're not stupid, you're just selfish. you're a slave to impulse. .
There's a couple of reasons why I think Katz is overreacting: 1) AOL/TW is in no position to monopolize the pipe into peoples' homes. Broadband is shaping up quite nicely, with Telcos (xDSL) and Cable Companies already competing. In the foreseeable future, we might also get additional competition via digital powerline and wireless solutions. 2) Of course, there's powerful economic reasons for the merger: AOL gets the broadband access it's been longing for, and TW gets a decent online outlet for their media. But in the mid-term future, the deal will probably bring lots of digital innovation into households, especially video and audio delivery. However, AOL/TW will not be able monopolize content, and that means that they might have to cooperate in the end, if people want to download Sony films, for example. 3) AOL may be an incredibly dull company, appealing to an, uh, digitally challenged audicence. But that's only by internet standards. Noone would ever think of phone or cable service as evil, simply because they're trying to make things as easy as possible for the majority of non tech-savvy people. With AOL/TW, the "normalization" of the internet is finally beginning. Remember that you it's hard to reach the non-wired 50% of Americans with PC-based solutions. That's why growth is leveling off at the moment. AOL/TW and similar deals will be instrumental in spreading the internet to more people. 4) I believe in the power of open standards and free markets. AOL will not be able to monopolize internet content. Nor will anyone else. The internet's diversity will thrive and appeal to people, even and maybe especially those used to AOL's monoculture. AOL might actually become even more of a proprietary front end to the internet than it already is.
You seem to have upped the number of major networks from 3 to a whopping 5... and I can't seem to figure out what the 5th is... the WB? Do you feel that you are effectively *defending* what the media would have us believe is diversity? The FCC regulation you speak of is clearly outlined in the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, in which the federal government considerably relaxed ownership coverage rules (hint: this means *fewer* viewpoints hitting the 'airwaves'). Anyway, you might be surprised to discover just how few control what so many see. Visit the Fairness In Accuracy and Reporting web site for some interesting insight into how incestuous the media actually is. And if you can get your hands on FAIR director Jeff Cohen's book "Unreliable Sources", do so. It's somewhat dated (early 90s?), but still a must read. I know I must sound like some sort of conspiracy theorist, but FAIR does their homework and presents all of the facts. Once you read up, you'll find yourself asking "why would the media possibly work any other way?" with, unfortunately, no good answer. It's all about money, which is good... but at the cost of honesty, which is not. Sorta creates paralles with the LinuxOne thread, although this makes LinuxOne seem not-so-scary.
A lot of people are OVER-reacting about this AOL/Time Warner merger. Big companies really are not as bad as they are often made out to be. One of the earlier posts mentioned Standard Oil controlling the US. Maybe true, but they were also one of the first American companies to promote R&D. Could that be a terrible thing? Consider TI and HP. They dominate the pocket calculator market, but they also made pocket calculators affordable for the average person, not just the scientist or engineer. Apple deserves props! Their innovation made desktop computers practical for the common man. They dominated the market for a while, but are no longer a threat that people worry about. By inventing technology that made computers accesable to everyone, they not only helped the average goof who needs a Mac, but also the more sophisticated user who benefits from competition, innovation, etc. People bash Microsoft all the time, but does MS ever get credit for the good that they have done? GUIs (Windows, Win95/98/NT, etc.) led to a tremendous boost in the home computer industry. They helped to make home/desktop computers practical for the masses, and affordable for all of us /. users. Look at IE, Word, and Excel. Everyone has heard of them, as they are what made computing what it is today. If it were not for the work of Apple and Microsoft, most computer users would have to log in to mainframes from dumb terminals, using something like UNIX. Nobody would have a home computer. As for AOL, they may have cluttered some of the net with dial-up dolts, but the masses of AOL users has led to great improvements in network technology. We probably wouldn't have broadband tech if there weren't a need. AOL helped to supply the need. Anyway, I've rambled enough now, but on a positive note: If I ever hear of AOL trying any mass mind control b.s., I will personally form an underground group of /. resistance fighters. We will dress up in armor made of duct tape and cat5 cable, and ride around on bicycles throwing sharpened AOL cds at anyone who would try to subjugate the innocent masses.
I agree that this is a good thing, let Steve Case start his own internet. This will allow those who choose to use the "classic" internet as they see fit and AOL will continue to spoon feed their brand of pablum to those who enjoy lowbrow content. I would only start worrying when AOL tries to do any of the following: 1. Buy any Linux distribution. Don't laugh Tivo is powered by a LinuxPPC varient. Tivo is a set top box/super VCR, AOL just happens to be developing a set top box too. Need I remind anyone that AOL owns Netscape already. 2. AOL tries to buy into a Baby Bell to side step cable franchise agreements. 3. AOL tries to buy a telco or a net backbone. I could see AOL envisioning itself as a ATT/TCI/AtHome competitor. Positive side effects of the AOL/Time Warner merger: 1. DSL will be more widely deployed by telcos to counteract the merger. This will only serve to make DSL more price competitive than it is currently. 2. AtHome will be more widely deployed by ATT/TCI. Don't think that they plan to stand by idly and watch AOL move in on the turf that they staked out. 3. MSN will fade to black much as eworld did. Has anyone seen www.msn.com? There is absolutely no mention of the merger nor has Bill Gates been seen or heard from. I think Gates is sulking in Redmond with his tail between his legs contemplating his next move. Sitting smugly in front of a LinuxPPC box, connected via DSL, watching DirectTV.
I couldn't have said it better than Katz and brunes69 did - I can only hope that those who have the power will protest this merger as much as the average person on the Net is protesting :)
HurlyBurly writes: 'You can engineer the future no more so than you can the past'. I'm a lurker but felt compelled to respond to this. Any number of writers have pointed out that controlling information is the means to controlling the past. A common example is the way Stalin had official photos engineered to remove the people he'd subsequently killed. I don't want to buy into the somewhat inflated claims of Katz but its important to remember that controlling the past enables you to control the future. Regards.
I completely agree with your last line. (I wrote my law honours thesis on an anti-technocrat line). Problem is we live in a owrld dominated by the most inane of 'information'. Who eactly is it that is keepin the just plain workin folk's knowledge alive (in Australia, at least, history is barely taught in grade school)? Regards
Where the merger could get bogged down is with the Federal Communications Commission or local cable regulators -- I believe the laws they administer frequently have a requirement that an acquisition of control of a cable licensee be "in the public interest". These laws explain why the AOL/TW brass were making plenty of noises yesterday about this being good for consumers.
As far as the threat to consumers/democracy, as long as (i) the First Amendment is not interpreted in a way to erode on-line freedoms of small proprietors, (ii) bandwide access (including eventually so-called broadband) is going to be available cheaply in a content-neutral fashion (like the phone lines), (iii) public document standards (like HTML) are available for any major document types, from text to sound and video, (iv) client software is universally available to support these document types and (v) adequate safeguards to user privacy are in place, I am not sure how worried I would be. Of course, all these conditions are not completely satisfied today, and market concentration presents a greater likelihood that they will not be able to be realized in the future, but I would think that it is within the power of "netizens" (a word I hate) and members of the open source/free software movement in particular, to ensure that these conditions are realized. The point of these conditions is to ensure that it is within the power of anyone or any group with even the most limited of resources, to distribute information that could potentially reach anyone else in world. If this is the case, then regardless of the market concentration of the largest content proprietors, niche providers will still be able to promote their businesses or, more importantly, disseminate information that is being ignored or suppressed by the mainstream media. Of course, it is still annoying to live in a world of uncultured, sheep-like consumer-drones, but I am not sure that the AOL/TM merger is going to be outcome-determinative of that issue.
Bonus Katz Flame: Katz is up to his old tricks again with the hyperbole and Wired-speak. I am disappointed in CmdrTaco that he sees fit to subject us to him, but, sad to say, Katz has probably made CmdrTaco and company millions of dollars -- his brand of controversy-provoking articles draws the page hits and comments that the valuation of Slashdot (and now Andover) is driven off of. Thus, in a sense, Katz himself represents the watered-down, anything-for-a-buck pseudo-content that he excoriates AOL and TM for delivering. I am really surprised that Katz can make a career off of his writing -- I initially though he was some barely-adult college buddy of CmdrTaco -- but he can, judging by his ability to get books published and the willingness of the mainstream press (not that they're any great shakes) to solicit quotes from him (as he so proudly notes in his article), and he is no spring chicken -- in a blurb on a site promoting a recent book of his, he notes he has a daughter at Yale (what a proud papa he must be!). I guess the mainstream press is ignorant enough about technology, and many (but not all or even most, of course) of the Slashdot readers have little appreciation of what good journalism and non-fiction is, that there is a niche for "tech journalists" like Katz, who are neither technically adept or much of a journalist, to flourish. (An aside: it especially pains me that he apparently has not made much of an effort to get up coding or Linux -- at the beginner level, its not rocket science, after all.) Of course, Katz is just a penny-ante example of the type of know-nothing that has infested the computing/internet business -- don't believe for a second that the multi-million-dollar-a-year financial analysts or investment bankers who have pumped up the net stocks are any better.
Time Warner:
..... AOL = ICQ, Winamp, Netscape, Compuserve, Digital City, iPlanet
Cable Networks:
TBS Entertainment
o 6 of 1999's 10 top-rated event programs year-to-date
o #1 in delivery of key adult demographics
o 3 of 5 top-rated basic cable networks
CNN News Group
o More than 76 million U.S. subscribers
o 600+ news affiliates in U.S. and Canada
Home Box Office o 10 branded channels
o 34.6 million U.S. subscribers (12/30/98)
o 23 Primetime Emmys
Publishing:
Time Inc.
o 33 magazines
o 31 New York Times best-sellers in 1998
o 120 million magazine readers (12/31/98)
Filmed Entertainment:
Warner Bros.
o 5,700 feature films
o 32,000 television titles
o 13,500 animated titles (including 1,500 classic toons)
New Line Cinema
o 4 of 1998's top 26 box-office hits
o The highest-grossing comedic sequel of all time, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Music:
Warner Music International, Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, Sire, Warner Bros
Warner Music Group
o 24 Grammys in 1999
o 23 of 1998's top 100 U.S. albums
o 1 million music copyrights
Cable Systems:
Time Warner Cable
o 21.3 million homes passed
o more than 13 million customers
o 34 cable clusters with 100,000+ subscribers
Time Warner Digital:
Road Runner(TM), CDNOW, CNN Interactive
This wasn't funny yesterday, and it's not any funnier today...
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
(Sarcasm mode on.)
Considering that AOL and Time Warner frequently screw their customers, I find the term "cross-fertilization" very appropriate.
Somebody needs to explain to me how this merger is a good thing. What is being accomplished that couldn't be done with a marketing agreement and a contract? Who does this benefit?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
http://www.cjr.org/owners/time-warner.asp
This page lists everything Time Warner owns. Some highlights:
Book-of-the-Month Club
Little, Brown and Co. (Publishers)
HBO
CNN
Cartoon Network
RoadRunner (cable internet access)
WB network (duh!)
Hanna-Barbera (cartoons)
Castle Rock Entertainment (TV, movies)
Witt-Thomas productions (TV, former makers of Roseanne)
Time Magazine
Fortune Magazine
Southern Living (I didn't even know about this one)
DC Comics and Vertigo Comics (AOL owns Sandman!!!)
Mad Magazine (and the TV show of the same name on Fox)
Viva (German Music TV)
Channel V (TV in India)
New Line Cinema (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mortal Combat, various other crappy movies)
Atlanta Braves (AOL owns John Rocker)
AOL Time Warner is in bed with Bertelsmann (AOL France, AOL Deutschland), Sony (Columbia House, HBO Asia), EMI (Viva, Channel V), Polygram (Viva), and Viacom (Comedy Central).
This new company is bound up in deals with its competitors, and the people it has deals with compete with each other. Nothing about the new company's operation are centralisable without destroying all those joint ventures. All kinds of anti-trust laws and agreements are tying it up. This new company does not pose any greaterr threat than it did before.
I wouldn't claim to speak for all Libertarians, but it doesn't bother me much. It certainly won't affect MY Internet connection. :) Of course we'll have to see if it affects CNN.COM and whatnot, but I have much more of an issue with the Mobil/Exxon merger, if anything. I'm still kinda wondering about that one.
Re. deregulation of the telecom industry, I think they're in a black hole or something entirely outside our known laws of physics. At least Bell Atlantic is. The physical reality of all that damn wiring makes it really hard to get any relief.
In general I find it interesting how many people here espouse govt restrictions on corporations while at the same time saying govt should get off our backs on everything else.
In the long run I don't think you can do anything about ultra-rich people or corps except vote with your dollars. AOL caters to a particular group of 20M people and has apparently given them what they want enough to make $760M last year. I'm sure THAT group of people would think "hell yes, let them buy anything they please, it'll benefit me". And they might be right.
There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore.
I don't recall seeing TOO many small newsletters doing well EVER. Small guys didn't get too far in meatspace; publishing and distributing tons of paper is expensive. The net empowers the little guy in a lot of ways, which this merger will not change. To say the little guy was more likely to be heard 20 or 80 years ago is bull. Remember the Hearst empire? Katz would have us believe it's all gone to hell just recently. Really it had always been owned by big guys.
Considering Katz has a place here to spout his particular brand of logic-free daily doom I shouldn't think he should worry much. You don't see him saying "Stay away from this SlashDot corporate ad-banner grab-fest; I'm only going to post articles at my GeoCities page for no money." He doesn't rail against the "SlashDot monopoly" for political tech news! He worked for ABC, wasn't it? Some small startup, that. And I'd like to see the difference in his bank account once he's been on a couple of know-nothing news shows telling the world his opinion this merger. Mo money mo money mo money. Just like any corporation. Hmmmm.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
Unfortunately, Katz doesn't quite comprehend (or express well enough) a true position on monopoly. Anyone who has taken introduction to microeconomics in college can tell you that being a monopoly is really not a problem for the economy. It's not illegal, and shouldn't be.
AOL's product was different than all others--they made it incredibly dumbed-down and easy to use for people who want it that way. Incredibly enough, there are about twenty million of them who want their internet served to them on a high chair. So AOL gives it to them--is there anything wrong with giving people what they want? Just because a company can produce a product better than any other, does that mean they're a monopoly and shouldn't be allowed to compete?
The real problem that Katz may be talking about is monopolistic practices. These are very different from being a monopoly. Microsoft exhibits monopolism--they've done very illegal things (make ultimatums to OEMs, etc) to keep their monopoly. There's nothing inherently wrong with Microsoft being a monopoly--only with the unethical practices they've used to keep it. I see no reason why a huge AOL-TimeWarner company would necessarily be monopolistic, even if they did have a large amount of market share.
Katz, go back to freshman econ. You can yammer about this merger all you want, but don't bring monopoly into it.
his argument is based on a very wrong premise. and that premise is that aol has the most of the *INTERNET* "market". this is far from the truth. while aol has the most concentrated userbase, aol users are not the majority on the internet. until that happens aol is not a threat. by the way, at&t's market share in cable is bigger as well.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
Well, this part at least I can say that I *think* AOL actually has a reason for it...Netscape. As soon as NS5/Mozilla is finished, they'll have a standards-compliant embeddable browser they can just swap with the VERY crappy one they have now. Their view on the browser situation is probably "We don't have time to worry about bugs in a browser that is just gonna get ditched in a year or so anyway". Sad but true.
Ahh...but now you've hit on the TRUE reason to hate AOL.
AOL, like most large corporations, views the populace as sheep. Dumb animals that are quick to panic in large numbers when they get scared, but are docile as long as they are happy.
What better way to keep the populace happy than to shield them from everything that is "bad"? If they never see/hear/read anything they might find remotely offensive, they will stay happy and keep spending money. And where will they spend the money?
Wherever the people keeping them happy tell them to. Which is, of course, what AOL wants.
So, AOL takes it upon itself to decide what is "good" and what is "bad". AOL being the judge, they get to define what constitutes "bad" - be it pornography, vulgarity, or simply opposing viewpoints.
And of course the Internet being a big, scary place, full of "bad" things, AOL must take it upon itself to shield it's subscribers from all of the nasty things that might be "bad" -- free thought, free expression, competition -- all of these things that would cause their docile little sheep to get excited.
As far as acquiring Time Warner goes...now AOL owns the pipes that information gets sent down. Like it or not, many people, including some very intelligent ones, take what CNN says as being the complete and total truth. Now that AOL has control, CNN can, and probably will become a forum for AOL's worldview to be touted to the masses.
Expect a rise in "feel good" news stories, as well as the typical stories designed to scare the populace -- murder, terrorism, school shootings, etc -- as these are the kinds of stories that pimp the media, government, and law enforcement as being the shining hope for humanity, when in fact they are as corrupt as the corporate profiteers.
All (media, government, law enforcement, corporations) are motivated by one thing: greed. There are more officers sitting in speed traps to punish Joe Q. Motorist for going 10 miles above the speed limit than there are rooting out the drug dealers, terrorists, and serial killers that are causing REAL problems.
I would be suprised if this is the last of the large corporations buying media companies. Now that AOL has Time Warner (outdoing Microsoft's MSNBC that noone takes really seriously anyway), expect many other corporations to follow suit.
I, for one, am hoping the FTC gets involved in this one, stopping what will be a HUGE problem down the line before it starts.
Okay, I've ranted enough for now =)
No, there's no liability at all! If I own one out of one million shares of Corporation A, and a court subsequently fines them one million dollars, I myself will not share any of the liability, not even the one dollar that is my share.
:-) than by crushing the competition.
So you think your stock price will stay the same after that huge fine? How about your dividends? By the above logic, if a company you own stock in makes a billion dollar profit, it doesn't matter because that money "went to the company" and not directly into your pocket.
This would only happen in the most absurd fantasy.
Failure of imagination is a poor argument. For any market where there are few enough competitors that the loss of one is consequential (i.e. most markets) and for which there are significant barriers to entry (again, most markets) knocking a competitor out of business is going to do good things in the long run for your profits.
Corporations exist to make profits, not to eliminate the competition. There is much more profit to be had by making a profit
Sure, if you never look beyond the short term. In the long term, on the other hand, it's just basic macroeconomics. The maximum profit a monopoly can draw out of a market is a higher than the total profit that a large group of competing companies can draw out of the same market... and is a lot higher than the profit that any one of those companies can make.
So if the barriers to entry in your market are high enough, it pays to crush the competition. And in some markets...
We all bitch about Microsoft's underhanded tactics, but can anyone imagine the power they'd have in a truly libertarian society, where the EULA could say anything they wanted and it would be 100% enforceable? Say goodbye to dual-booting. Picture licenses for Visual C++ that disallow the purchasing company from developing software for any other platform, and (software enforced) licenses for Windows that don't let you run software created without Microsoft development tools. Microsoft could make running new Windows programs under Wine illegal, and make it stick. They could change TCP/IP over the course of a year so that only Windows computers could talk to Windows computers, and make it stick. This garbage about disallowing preinstalled Netscape is nothing compared to what a company with that kind of dominance could do if they weren't afraid of government reprisal.
I wonder how much of the Western world's media is now concentrated into the hands of Time/Warner and News International.
And I find myself wondering at how little I care. The bigger 'Media' gets, the easier it is to avoid. Settle the fsck down.
; )
**>>BELCH
As a frequent 'detractor' of sorts, I leave the JKatz box checked as well, much as he would wish all detractors simply ignore him and let his words drift unhindered into the eyes and minds of the typical reader.
The car-wreck appeal of his articles guarantees a large audience, and many excellent opportunities to openly oppose what I feel to be grevious and often harmfully mistaken assertions put forth in many of his pieces.
He has the right to act as an Instigator if he wishes. Instigators by nature don't like voices of dissent, and will try to quiet them with threats or cajoling. Katz is the cajoling type, who will say, in a hurtful tone of voice, "If you don't like my writing and can't say anything nice (sob) then don't read it!"
Bulls*it on that!
**>>BELCH
I really hate it when he says "If you don't like what I write, respond to me personally, and I promise I'll write back."
And he will, too, out of sheer gratitude that you didn't have the 'nerve' to oppose him on the public forum he road in on.
Phaghh!
**>>BELCH
Time/Warner has turned to shit. I don't usually swear here and I apologize but that's the only word for it. They can't tell straight news without having an obvious tie-in to some TW movie, character or tv-show. People recognize it all for the shit it is. The people who read TIME now are the same folks who read People magazine and the Weekly World News back in the 80's. The people who read (past tense) TIME when it mattered now multi-source on the web for their news.
What I'm saying is that TIME/Warner is a lost cause. It's a big, beautiful horse with cancer and bad teeth. AOL has acquired a pile of shit that will allow them to put Bugs Bunny(tm) on their promotional materials. Seeing as all Warner Bros. characters quite effectively died with Mel Blanc, this is of no consequence.
Much Ado About Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
**>>BELCH
domination of information dissemination is the *really* scary prospect
A scary prospect that exists only in your own panic-stricken mind.
I'll end by bringing this thread to it's logical conclusion:
Bugs Bunny is the new Hitler and will bring about the extermination of all who oppose him!
I can see all the activists and slashdotters lining up at the crematoriums where, instead of the old "Work is the father of freedom", the building entrance will have a sign that says "T-T-T-That's All, Folks!"
**>>BELCH
Bashing the man is not important or proper, but for those who disagree, bashing the man's content *is* important. The very fact that you think he's an excellent author says that, in my opinion, you need to read some of the Katz-bashing posts a *lot* more closely.
**>>BELCH
So you're worried that the Backstreet Boyz will start singing praise of AOL and various Time/Warner enterprises? Hmm. You got me there. I'm gonna start building my bunker now.
**>>BELCH
Capitalism - Free trade, market forces and all that.
Capitolism - A sexual response to images of the United States Capitol building, largely due to its close resemblance to a large white tit.
**>>BELCH
It's not zero regulation as much as it is minimal regulation. It means we don't paint ourselves into a corner by mandating some new quick-fix(TM) regulation for every potentially threatening situation that pops up.
Katz' worries about 'independent journalistic culture' extend as far as his next paycheck. The fact is that the net is making things like 'independent journalistic culture' obsolete, so it's only fitting that he and his ilk leap about like so many roaches on a griddle at the thought of their cozy little island sinking beneath the waves. I don't blame him, but I don't owe him a living, either.
Truth is, journalistic culture is now more random and spontaneous. You're as likely to read an enlightening tidbit from an Anonymous Coward here on Slashdot as you are from a staff writer for CNN or The Nation or whatever rag/portal you choose.
**>>BELCH
Spend some quality time with Google and learn more about what you are talking about. Here is some background on the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and you are not even close.
The value of a free press is closely related to free speech in the sense that one can criticize the government without fear of being jailed or killed for it. That doesn't stop people from thinking free speech/free press means we can say/print/photograph anything we want and nobody can do anything about it.
Others have already pointed out that this is not a monopoly. There is plenty of competition and other avenues for news/entertainment.
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
<quote>
Dear Members:
Less than two weeks ago, people all over the world came together in a global celebration of the new year, the new century, and the new millennium. As I said in my first Community Update of the 21st Century, all of us at AOL are extremely excited by the challenges and the prospects of this new era, a time we think of as the "Internet Century."
I believe we have only just begun to see clearly how the interactive medium will transform our economy, our society, and our lives. And we are determined to lead the way at AOL, as we have for 15 years -- by bringing more people into the world of interactive services, and making the online experience an even more valuable part of our members' lives.
That is why I am so pleased to tell you about an exciting major development at AOL. Today, America Online and Time Warner agreed to join forces, creating the world's first media and communications company for the Internet Century. The new company, to be created by the end of this year, will be called AOL Time Warner, and we believe that it will quite literally change the landscape of media and communications in the new millennium.
This really is something to celebrate. That's because we are so excited about how this new company will speed the growth of the Internet, making the online experience richer and more meaningful than ever before, for more people than ever before.
Even though AOL and Time Warner have been two very different companies, we share a common commitment to our customers and a common vision for the future -- and we are confident that we will be a perfect fit together as one company.
Just think of it: AOL members already represent the largest community in cyberspace. Together with our other services -- from CompuServe, Netscape and ICQ, to Digital City, AOL Instant Messenger, AOL Moviefone, Spinner and Winamp -- we are touching tens of millions of people's lives in every corner of the world.
Time Warner is the world's #1 media and entertainment company -- with an unsurpassed range of household name brands ranging from CNN and HBO to Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, and Looney Tunes; from Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema to Warner Music Group labels and the Turner entertainment networks.
Together, AOL Time Warner will create a new company for the Internet Age -- a global company on the cutting edge of content and technology, with an unprecedented ability to drive commerce and communication ...and to build community.
Indeed, we are looking forward to working together to meet the challenges of bridging the digital divide, to enhance educational resources for children, and to encourage more people to get involved in their communities.
We are particularly excited about the benefits this merger will bring consumers when high-speed broadband networks become even more widespread. Time Warner's cable connections already criss-cross the country, supplying more than 20 percent of American households with the potential for faster Internet connections and a greater range of online services.
We are committed to expanding that potential so it can reach as many people as possible -- and to working with other companies to ensure all consumers have access to the broadband experience.
At AOL, we work hard every day to fulfill our mission of building a medium as central to people's lives as the telephone and the television -- and even more valuable. Time Warner shares that vision -- and this merger advances the day when that vision becomes reality.
Since the day we launched our first online service, our members have been the driving force behind AOL's success - and you will continue to be our top priority. You can look forward to the same great experience that has made us the largest community in cyberspace ... and the best is yet to come!
Warm Regards,
Steve Case
</quote>
--
The scary bit is that AOL now owns power over CNN. When it was just Time Warner, they didnt do much to impose their own style and name on the news service, but now that AOL (with it's ego centric view has taken the reigns), I fear that it would soon be AOL CNN rather than just CNN.
--
>Well, you point here is no good... at least if AOL is true to their word. They have already said they will be
/.
>opening their cable lines up to other ISP's.
Mebbe not. Case has already been making noises that this deal will allow the marketplace, not the government to decide how people get access.
This directly affects my home town, Portland OR, where there is a fight between the local government & ATT/TCI over cable access. Up until this development, AOL was the major corporate supporter for open access. Now he's seen as a traitor to this cause.
``Steve Case is the Benedict Arnold of the digital age, "said Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education. ``He's campaigned all acros the country for open access. After he purchases access for AOL, he's no longer in favor of pubolic policy.
Also let me quote one of the local politicos on this, Erik Sten, Portland City Commissioner, who believes Cases words are ``code for no open access. Open access has probably lost a major champion."
Oh well, the Official Talking Heads (tm) have had their 15 minutes. They talked to Katz, they talked to Chester & to Sten. Odd that the news sources aren't talking to the folks actually out on the Internet, like the folks on
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I'm not a media analyst, but what's this talk about 'monopoly' - aren't there plenty of viable competitors like Disney/ABC, Murdock's News/FOX, Viacom, MSNBC, Viacom, etc? To draw analogy from the car industry, there once was a LOT of little auto companies, they eventually consolidated (must be SOME economic advantage of doing so) into the big three (Warning: US centric pov) Also Ford was big on vertical integration, owned or wanted to own everything from the coal/iron mines to the dealerships and everything inbetween.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Then again, the jingoistic BS spouted during our own media (here in the States) after the Gulf War didn't save Bush....
Finding God in a Dog
Jon,
I'm surprised you haven't read my original comment yesterday in regards to this merger.
This is a VERY chilling merger, because the combination of AOL and Time-Warner can dictate a large fraction of what we see in the movies, what we see on TV (over-air AND cable), what we heard on records, what we read in general-interest magazines, and soon what we can see on the Internet.
I think the FTC and Department of Justice will VERY carefully look at this merger. This merger may also not bode well for the DoJ in the US v. Microsoft case, because this event will give Microsoft plentiful ammuntion to prove that their marketshare in the computer market could fall due to rapid changes in the computer industry. In short, the US v. Microsoft case has just been rendered obselete by this massive merger.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
They dumped hordes of clueless newbies onto the net, sucking up countless hours of time from admins and moderators all over the place
So you're saying, what, that newbies shouldn't be on the net? How would they have done it any differently?
Besides, those "clueless newbies" are the folks that every e-commerce site on the net is trying to attract. There are a hell of a lot more of them than there are of us. The net would be a much smaller and less interesting place if those "clueless newbies" were not able to get online.
and not paying a penny for all that trouble.
AOL doesn't pay for its bandwidth?
That's the joy of controlling the market, the consumer CAN'T go someplace else. Don't like CNN, try Headline News, oops same company, how about MSNBC,
Ummmm... MSNBC is a collaboration between Microsoft and NBC, which I believe is owned by GE.
doh!, how about FoxNews,
FoxNews is owned by Fox, I presume, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. That's not TW. ABCNews is owned by Disney, which is also a different source. And you also have Reuters, AP, BBC, NPR, Drudge, Gannet, dozens of hometown papers, dozens of magazines, etc. TW is hardly in a position to control the news. Yes, TW owns a lot of media, but other companies own a much larger portion.
I think you also underestimate the awareness of the American people. The media loves a scandal, and they are particularly happy to report on the screw-ups of their competitors. There have been several instances of bad reporting and/or corporate pressure killing stories, and they have been thouroughly aired in competing media. In several cases, it forced the resignation of the people responsible.
So anyone who thinks that this merger is a threat to the free press is smoking crack. Perhaps it's a threat to the few people who are so stupid and lazy as to get all their news from a single source, but those people don't matter too much anyway.
OK, someone has his head in the sand. First of all, TW does not own all the cable companies, or anywhere close to it. AT & T owns at least as many, and there are others as well. Secondly, the cable company monopoly is a government-imposed one anyway, and if the government got out of the way, there would likely be competition. Thirdly, there are other connection technologies, including DSL, ISDN, and various wireless alternatives, that compete with cable. And finally, 56k is not going to be banned, only superceded by better technology. In the event that AOL cornered the market we could continue using our 56k modems.
Just last month they were suing for "open access" to AT & T's lines. Those lines are still there, and odds are AOL will shut up about open access now that they have lines of their own. Get a grip: AOL is not Big Brother.
I had a friend (an attorney with two children) who was a damn smart person, but knew diddly about technology and the Internet. He was paying $50-$70 per month so his kids could research school work on the Internet and he still had to regulate their usage of the net due to the cost. He had no idea he could get unlimited access for about $20 per month until I gave him a list of ISP's in his area.
I would be inclined to chalk this up more to AOL's general lack of foresight than to any malice on their part. The per-hour usage was the way this sort of thing was done back then, and very few people realized the potential of the internet to transform things. AOL provided a valuable service in those days, and the simple fact was that no one was ready to set newbies up to use a raw internet connection in those days. TCP/IP stacks were not built into consumer OS's, PPP required seperate packages, and the computers were a lot slower than they are now. Very few people knew people with the expertise to set up a real 'net connection.
AOL tried to compete with the internet and lost. What forced them to cut their rates was competition from more nimble competitors. It looks to me like this is a classic case of an extablished player seeing its business model destroyed by more nimble competitors. Capitalism at work, and not the fault of AOL or anyone else.
mergers will stop when enough people have been fired after mergers to create real pressure groups to stop the madness. Imagine a situation where twenty percent of the working population become jobless as a result of mergers and start calling their congressmen
You are ignoring supply and demand. If 20% of the population were unemployed, wages would drop and other companies would hire them. The fact is that most companies are hiring, and for every merger that eliminates jobs, there are other companies hiring everyone in sight. Don't expect any riots any time soon.
These two things (Big business and competitive enterprise) are antithetical...
How do you figure? There are many markets dominated almost entirely by big businesses, and competitive enterprise is alive and well. Look at the telecom, computer, automotive, and fast food industries. All of them are dominated by Big Business, and all of them are highly competitive.
It is arguable (although I would disagree) that *some* Big Businesses are detrimental to free enterprise, but that doesn't make them always antithetical. The pertinent question is: is AOL damaging to the free enterprise system? I don't see how it is. There are a large number of competing ISP's, with various levels of service and of various sizes. I can't see AOL doing the free-market system any harm.
Because, it's the gut feeling of geeks everywhere that traditional broadcast media (time warner) should not be able to purchase one of their largest competitors, simply because it will narrow consumer choice.
Well, here's one geek who thinks no such thing. There are a lot of broadcast companies out there, and even more ISP's and online news sources. I don't see consumers being hurt by this, and there's a good think that the new company will come up with new ways of integrating various media for a better user experience. This probably won't excite hard-core geeks, but there are a lot of people out there who won't touch a computer until it's as easy to use as a toaster. AOL/TW could help make that happen.
Even if nothing else comes of this, this may be a big win for AOL's customers, as AOL will suddenly have a vast news-gathering and entertainment organization at their disposal.
And in any event, since when is "the gut feeling of geeks" the determining factor in corporate mergers?
Back before the AOL connection to the internet, the net was still an intellectual vehicle; most people you'd find online were real techies or scientists.
Now at best you'll find mostly script kiddies or wanna be tech reporters.
Sure, from a hard-core tech perspective, the S/N ratio has probably dropped. But the point is that the signal is still there, and if you're interested in anything other than hard-core tech subjects, the usefullness of the net has increased dramatically. All those newbies you look down your nose at bring with them dollars that advertisers want, and so we get dozens of free news sites, search engines, map generators, babelfish, and dozens of other services-- all for free. Similarly, amazon.com, eBay, and others would likely not be where they are today if they got all their business from a few thousand geeks. It's that vast pool of newbies that make them viable.
Now is that more intersting? You might say the answer is no, but probably 90% of 'net users would disagree.
I'm afraid I'm seeing the same thing with Linux these days. The GUIs are all very well developed and strong; but again it's detracting people from the power and freedom of the command line.
I have news for you: 99% of the population has no need or desire to learn a command line. It is simply not worth the effort. This doesn't make them stupid or lazy, it simply means that they have different priorities. Your life (and mine) revolves around computers. Most peoples' do not. For them, the computer is a tool, just like a toaster, and the less time they have to take learning to use it, the more time they have for more important tasks.
If you don't like GUI's, fine. Uninstall X and run from the command line to your heart's content. But if Linux is ever going to be more than a fringe operating system, it needs to appeal to more than the fringe of geeks who currently use it. A better GUI is a step in that direction.
I think you're vastly overestimating the influence of both CNN and AOL. They are but two among dozens of major news outlets. There are several other cable news channels, a half-dozen broadcast TV networks, hundreds of newspaper publishers, dozens of magazine publishers, thousands of internet sites, a dozen radio stations, and direct satellite TV. That's several thousand news sources owned by several companies on half a dozen different media. Two companies that have combined control over two media and maybe 2 dozen news outlets are hardly in the position to control the opinion of the American people.
Besides, the nation is getting older. Tomorrow's voters are today's youth, and they will most definitely know what a search engine is. I'd be willing to bet that your mother doesn't get all her news off of AOL anyway.
A serious, 'better' GUI is going to be no less confounding to the pedestrian user actually.
Really? Obviously you're not going to plop a completely new user in front of a Mac or PC and expect him to be an expert in an hour. But GUI's have a number of advantages over CLI's that cut down training time and reduce frustration for novice users. The problem with most existing GUI's is that they aren't very good. Mac OS is the only one that comes close to doing it well, Windows is mediocre, and the X-based WM are just awful.
General purpose machines are simply too complicated for the sort of user you seem to be describing. This isn't elitism so much as it is a realization that the current (pretty much locked in solutions) haven't really been cutting it.
Sure they have. I have managed to teach my completely computer-illiterate grandfather to do email and web browsing. It was something of a pain, but I shudder to think what it would be like to try to accomplish the same feat under Linux.
Certainly expecting a GUI to allow users to recompile their kernals is unrealistic. But for the tasks your average user needs a computer for, a standard Windows or Mac installation does the job just fine.
Monopolies are indeed bad, but we do not have a monopoly. True, Windows has a large market share, but there are alternatives, and people are using them. And if Linux advocates are right, the future will be even more competitive, no matter what Microsoft does about it.
Because they had to put up with yet more Thatcher government, while Argentina's Junta had to make a hasty retreat on account of losing so bad. And was there a media monopoly! The news in Argentina were that we were winning, yeah, winning, winning, and then lost. All for some stupid rocks. Oh yeah, strategic location and all that crap. Like it makes any difference now, save of course for those who fought it, their families, etc. War sucks.
AOL claims they will continue to fight for open access for ISPs to cable. Let's hope they will. But maybe that stance is just temporary to avoid anti-trust complaints.
In fact, even the aggregation of cable and traditional content providers is worrisome and has led to a restricted menu of cable content already. Altogether, I'd feel more comfortable if regulatory agencies prohibited these kinds of deals outright.
If cable companies with broadband networks were bound by "open access" rules, in the same way that phone companies with long-distance lines are bound, then AOL-TW's efforts to sell both Net access and content wouldn't matter.
(If you think that "open access" regulations are a bad thing because cable companies should have the right to do whatever they dang please with their cables, then I suspect you don't have any objections to the AOL-TW merger, either.)
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
...this merger would create "the most exciting and socially conscious company the world has ever seen!" :-)
I don't know if that comment is pre or post Jane tho
Actually the reason I'm worried is it seems that its the media types who are most worried about this merger; I clipped that quote from Scott Rosenberg's sharp commentary at salon
Hrrrm. I wonder what percentage of the world population has access to television or movie theatres. It's pretty much fair to assume that most, if not all, of these people have, at one point or another, come across some content by Time-Warner. My point is that, compared to TW's numbers, AOL's measly 20M subscribers is virtually nothing - not even a full percent of the world population. (Of course, it's a larger percentage of the more economically representative layers of the world population, but still.)
AOL has been achieving painfully little market penetration since it began doing business here in Brazil, maybe a few months ago. There are literally hundreds of lawsuits pending against AOL-BR for having their free CDs completely reconfigure the host computers, and it seems they're going to lose them. There are already about half a dozen well-established and very powerful ISPs which control a sizeable fraction of the market and aren't letting goal. AOL has yet to manage to strike any significant bundling deal with any of the major OEMs. In general, the press reaction has been very anti-AOL, and a sizeable fraction of the Brazilian computer-using public reads at least the computer section of the major newspapers. Maybe this situation is exclusive to Brazil because of its peculiar situation, but their invasion of the Brazilian market was pretty much a flop.
Finally, I'd like to point out that it seems likely that Internet-related stock is going to drop like crazy very soon (*), and AOL is likely to be very damaged by this.
Here, finally, there should be a conclusion. Unfortunately, I have no actual point, and hence no conclusion to speak of. I just wanted to give you something to think about. As always, draw your own conclusion.
* I know, the Internet trade boom is merely representative to the shift to the information age, stock prices will merely stabilize, economic Darwinism will take its toll, and things will go back to normal, and all that. But the world - and particularly the financial market - tends toward hysteria, and that means that, whether you like it or not, the Internet stock market is eventually going down. (Kaufmann says as he dons his asbestos vest and waits for the flames from the economics experts in Slashdot)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
In the course of writing about the microsoft trial, i read up on anti-trust but I sitll have a question which someone with legal experience could possibly comment on:
Currently in modern society, the internet and media are two unique and separate entities. We are slowly moving towards a (media buzzword of yesteryear) convergance of these two markets. Now let's move on to the real question:
If and when society recoginizes media and internet as inseperable, would a merger like this be allowed as to where currently this would be coming under government scrutiny? Take, for instance, Microsoft (please! =) ). If at somepoint in the future, the broswer becomes the OS should Microsoft be allowed to merge an internet division and operating systems division to form one company? (This is all under the assumption that the DOJ were to break MS into an applications division and an OS division.)
If I company HAD to merge to survive ( let's call it evolution of business in this case), what right would the government have to stop them from evolving to stay in business? Also if innovation, as MS puts it, leans towards a trend of converging technologies, who is the government to say no?
Most of you know that I am firmly for the breaking up of microsoft as current technology does not dictate the browser as the OS, but in thinking about the time-warner/AOL merger it brought these questions to light.
Any clues?
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
"So you think your stock price will stay the same after that huge fine?"
Sometimes it even goes up after a fine (okay, the lawsuit's over, they're still in business, now buy, buy, buy...)
A stock price is the price of a share of ownership. There is nothing a judge can do to affect it other than a very indirect influence upon public perception.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"The impact of mergers like this is to deny choice, concentrate power and homogenize creativity and expression."
:-)
What? This new megalith will prevent you from reading Newsweek? This is groundless paranoia. You still have your choice. You're still free to create your own media outlets. And if a merger is all it takes to stifle your creativity, I seriously doubt you were creative to begin with.
"Many of us are free marketers here"
I hate to break the news to you,Katz, but you were never a free marketeer. Do you think I'm so stupid I can't remember any of your previous columns?
"At some point, Americans have to decide if they still want a free information culture, along with a functioning government."
What does the TW+AOL merger have to do with a functioning government? Or are you just disappointed that Judge Jackson didn't immediately step in and block it upon your advice?
"EM>This company would be much larger in cultural influence and economic power than most countries on the earth."
The State of California is equivalent to a first world nation in power. I think I recall that if it were independent, it would be the six largest economy in the world. But guess what? It is not an independent nation, and must obey the US Constitution along with it's own Constitution.
But TimeWarnerAOL is not an independent nation, nor a state, country or municpality. It must follow the very same laws that you and I must. If Microsoft's billions couldn't buy off Judge Jackson, what makes you think TimeWarnerAOL's multibillions would be any better?
"The move represents the most sweeping move yet by corporate conglomerates to control high-speed access to the Internet and to dominate its content."
They have absolutely zero control over my internet access. Zero. That's because I don't use AOL as my ISP. And should they decide to purchase my local mom-and-pop ISP, I still have a choice, many of them in fact. One of them is Pacific Bell, which even T/W/A would not be able to buy.
"The age of proprietorship may have ended yesterday" (in reference to IBM and Linux)
If by "proprietorship" you mean proprietary standards, then you may be correct. But if you are referring to mythical stalmanist utopia where all software is held in common for the Greater Good, you are way off base.
"A movement that began as a counter-cultural, individualistic effort to keep the Net free from the very kind of corporatist control the AOL/Time-Warner merger typifies"
Oh, was that why Linux, BSD, and GNU were created? To keep the net free from corporations? Okay, I'll turn off the sarcasm. Other than GNU and any projects under it, I am not aware of any open source project that is based on any ideology, let along a counter-cultural one. And GNU is hardly antagonistic to business concerns.
The internet is not under corporate control. I seriously doubt it ever will be. No corporation, even TimeWarnerAOL, has the resources to purchase every ISP, let alone all of the infrastructure of the internet. You're living in a paranoid fantasy.
"There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore."
If you mean in terms of megamedia, you may be right. But what's your point? Isn't that what you're railing against, mega-anythings? But open up your eyes. Every community in the US has its smaller media outlets including small newspapers, radio stations and television stations.
"sensationalized promoters of controversy and fragmentation, producers of tepid, homogenized information-peddling."
Careful, someone might mistake this description for you
"As of this week, individuals, people who believe in free and diverse speech..."
...have the opportunity to deny the same to others based on the fact that we think they are too big.
"Wal-Mart, Blockbuster Video, Staples, Toys R Us, Starbucks, Disney and now, AOL/Time-Warner, rule our world."
Earlier in history, our world was ruled by Montgomery Wards, Penneys, Rexall and Esso. Even earlier days of yore were ruthlessly exploited by the likes of Sears and Roebuck. We are always going to have large companies. It's the nature of business. However, no one is forcing you to frequent their establishments or read their content. If you don't like Starbucks, don't drink their coffee. Simple. They aren't the only coffee stand in town.
Now don't misunderstand me, Mr. Katz. I am not in favor of corporations as fictitious legal entities that absolve their shareholders of any liability. However, size doesn't matter. If mergers are bad, then the corner drugstore merging with the downtown florist is just as bad as the big mergers. If your criteria on goodness/badness is the economic value of something, then I can only conclude that you yourself are in the wrong since you make more money than I. And what could I conclude about Andover?
Don't point your finger at size and call it a crime. Give me some specific criminal actions that TimeWarnerAOL have committed that would justify the government breaking them up.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
"Liability is limitted to the amount of the shareholder's investment in the company."
:-) than by crushing the competition.
No, there's no liability at all! If I own one out of one million shares of Corporation A, and a court subsequently fines them one million dollars, I myself will not share any of the liability, not even the one dollar that is my share. If the day comes when Judge Jackson fines Microsoft several million or even billion dollars, none of it will come out of Bill Gates' pocket. Even if the Microsoft share price plummets as a result, there is still liability against Bill Gates other than his actions as a Microsoft employee.
"if the company is sufficiently large to have significant financial reserves it can lower the costs of its goods and services until they reach unprofitable levels."
Ah, the classic rebuttal. However, it doesn't work. First of all, megacorp has to take a large profit hit for a significant amount of time. Cash reserves aren't infinite and investors are going to bail after a few quarters of losses. Second, it is not worth taking a billion dollar loss to drive a million dollar competitor out of business. Doing so would be extremely foolish, and fools don't create monopolies.
"Monopoly company will have replenished its cash reserves sufficiently to once again rout the competition."
This would only happen in the most absurd fantasy. Corporations exist to make profits, not to eliminate the competition. There is much more profit to be had by making a profit
And product price is not everything.
As a case in point, take a look at Home Depot. They probably have the closest thing to an idiot leadership as anyone. Their goal is to be the biggest. They even have a "Wall of Shame" where they display photos of all the other businesses they have bought out or run out of town. Definitely not a paragon of business acumen. So look what's happening around Home Depots. Their competitors are scrambling to build next to them. Even the small mom-and-pops want to set up shop across the street. Why? Because Home Depot customers hate Home Depot. The get rude service by ignorant salesmen. Their competitors set up shop next door and rake in business by being polite, helpful and knowledgable. Home Depot will get business from those who don't care about anything other than price, and their competitors get everyone else.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
better bottom line, which is a major objective of corporations
totally misses the point. What other things would you allow corporations to pursue to make money? Perhaps genocide or slavery? What about snuffing out their business competitors? How about reaching a critical mass that makes them so able to leverage deals, discourage competitive entry to their market, that the only response for other corporations is to merge to become a similar size? The only logical evolutionary result of an unchecked, unregulated industry is conglomeration, aggregation and a smaller number of large companies. There is at least one good historical example of this in the dawn of modern technology - the "electrical" companies that sprang up at the tail end of the 19th century, especially in Germany. There were many of these (Einstein's father was involved in one) and they innovated and competed like mad. But they discovered that there were economies of scale and gradually accumulated until there were giants like Siemens. Lack of regulation leads to unfair competition, that is what the U.S. has found historically, that's why the laws against monopolies are there - because people generations before you saw it happening in the Steel and Mining industries and in Wood pulp and Newspapers and realized that unchecked competition leads to a shitty deal for those not in the companies.
Big business and competitive enterprise are allowed to grow free in our country.
These two things are antithetical (that means that they're opposed to each other before you ask -it's a shorter, easier word than the long complicated phrase). That's why there are laws against it, this glorious nation decided that it's citizen would be free, not ruled by their government, but ruling it, nor yet ruled by corporations. The freedom that you talk about is your freedom to be a peon, a slave and a consumer.
Is there something wrong with "aquiring" information? Please...
Well, seeing as you ask nicely - acquiring information is fine as long as you don't stop others from also acquiring it (ever hear of something called the GPL?), because that means you can make more informed decisions and the person that makes the best free choices on the basis of this free information does better. Your scenario allows for the choice between a Big Mac and an Arbys. I would like to be able to have more choice. I would like perhaps even to do my own cooking. So, run off back to your Windows box.
Becaues, it's the gut feeling of geeks everywhere that traditional broadcast media (time warner) should not be able to purchase one of their largest competitors, simply because it will narrow consumer choice.
Competitor? Yes.. they are a competitor.. they are both in the business of capturing people's attention and time.
Hmm... AOL with control of the media because they now have CNN and TNT? I think somebody needs to diversify his news-viewing tastes if he thinks that these two cable channels give it the power to take over the world. . .
And if you don't believe me, look at UK elections following the Falklands war. The jingoism and patriotic bullshit spouted by the media ensured Margaret Thatchers's return to power despite the appaling state of the economy.
Funny how when your guy loses its always the fault of the unfair media, but when they win its always due to the wisdom of the voters.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I got an email from my friend saying that Intel and AOL were merging together. Admittedly it was one of the stupid "Aol and Intel are making email tracking software" forwards, but it seems quite nicely timed with this announcement.
First, at the time, Sony only understood electronics. Sony's management didn't (and still) don't get entertainment--and for five years the Japanese board of directors attempted to micromanage Sony's entertainment devisions like they did Sony's electronics division. And they floundered. Eventually Sony so screwed up the entertainment divisions that they had to divest themselves of some of the entertainment assets, and re-hire the American corporate heads they originally canned during the merger. So while today Sony still owns Sony Pictures, creates a few television shows, and are present in a big way in the music industry, they do so in fairly independant divisions who compete with each other as much as they cooperate.
I don't about anyone else but I think Japan has figured out the entertainment market.
Get ready for wave 2 of Pokemon.
I have to admit the continuuing towards larger and larger media conglomerates concerns me, though I would like to see some specific evidence showing homogenization of news. Are there documented examples of stories being ignored or squelched? Echelon comes to mind. Any others? A counter argument proposed by NPR last night suggested that, since these companies were *so* large and spread out, they were forced to be diverse and open in coverage of news.
I'm not a big fan of M$ (Windows), NBC ((you)MUST SEE TV!!!), or Fox (America's Most Dangerous Police Chasing Animal Fugitive Cops,(they still get props for the Simpsons though, but news?!)).
I think you also underestimate the awareness of the American people.
Not at all, they are very aware...of the things they pay attention to, of the things laid before them. Unfortunately most of us in the U.S. are damn lazy, or are "couch potatoes" common fauna the world over? Most (67%+) basically take what's given them. Many think critically on that info, but don't go beyond it. A good third follow blindly on most things, from politics to light beer. And at least 4.2% don't believe a damn thing. (all figures POMA(pulled outta my ass))
My problem with this (can you ever trust a movie review from AOL again?) and other mass media mergers, ESPECIALLY with non-media companies is the way they limit the stories we hear. In a time when it's not hard to whip up massive agression against big business (Seattle), why don't you see exposes on network TV? Who in the media would think of challenging these companies? Do you think NBC is going to do an in depth report on Microsoft business practices? Will ABC talk about what a run-down boring place Disneyland is, or employ anyone who vocally holds that opinion? Will CNN pick up and run with that fictional story in the future about the guy who raped 647 young girls after he snagged their info on AOL? When media companies can change copyright laws to help protect future earnings (Disney, et all), fight the progress of media technology (RIAA/MP3), perhaps Beck has it right when he says (and you accuse) "MTV makes me wanna smoke crack" (MTV is owned by Viacom who recently merged with CBS, here's a list of stations where you just might hear than hot new song you saw the video for on MVTHV1, and vice versa)
The crux comes in when you realize that most (and more with every mega-merger) of the people who bring you news and information are in league with or owned by people who can benefit from information and news being spun a certain way at a certain time. The job description says to bring you the news, but the contract with the shareholders says to make the most money.
Sorry, went off a bit there, but this is a trend that I fear. I fight it by talking about it, maybe the meme will flourish. Like the one thing I learned from watching G.I.Joe all those years, "Knowing is half the Battle" (hmm, time to change the sig...). Acting is the other half (I don't use AOL, I avoid mass market cinema, I don't watch a lot of TV news but I'm usually on top of things, I have real "Friends", I don't give M$ money (outside the M$ tax))
When the people that bring me my information are more worried about how to make money off that information than delivering it to me, it's time to worry. 'tis another reason I hang out here.
+&x
I was thinking last night about what Time-Warner owns and now AOL will own. Please correct/add to this list; this is just the stuff that I have regular contact with.
HBO
Time Magazine
Warner Bros.
RoadRunner Cable service
Matsushita (Panasonic, JVC, Pioneer) once owned Universal, but they sold it to Seagram (an alchoholic beverage company), the current owner.
Jon, we don't need anti-trust law. There are two kinds of monopolies: those created by the market because the company has created something people want, and those created by the government. In Time-Warner's case, their cable franchises were granted in a monopolistic fashion, so there's your problem right there. In AOL's case, where's the monopoly? There isn't one. They just did a better job than anyone else at getting people on the Internet. So why shouldn't they merge, other than the fact that YOU don't want them to?
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The merger needs to be carefully scrutinized, and hopefully stopped. You are wrong because you have decided before examination (that's a priori for you legal latin lovers) that the merge is bad. You want to stop it regardless of its actual effects. Why? Because you suffer from a fear of the future. If it's new, it's presumptively bad without "scrutiny", and must be "stopped". See Virginia Postrel's _The Future and its Enemies_ for a real clue. -russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
You said:
That's the joy of controlling the market, the consumer CAN'T go someplace else. Don't like CNN, try Headline News, oops same company, how about MSNBC, doh!, how about FoxNews, hmmm, new bikinis.
I say:
Don't like those -- try the BBC or the Washington Post or the New York Times or just hit Yahoo or Google and find any of thousands of other sources.
I don't see the problem...
Tadas
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and
and he also said
As to this last one
As to the first question (re. monopolies / oligopolies), again, I'm not Joe Everyman or even Joe Libertarian, but the public discourse about monopoly in the abstract and putative monopolies has been poisoned (IMO), by accepting the assumptions of those who are mostly in favor of government regulation. The biggest of these is the one that you intelligently question: what's to stop a slugfest with a permanent, market-controlling, customer-abusive winner?
Answer: lots of things, but they all boil down to Market Competition (caps are mine, just for fun). Can anyone with a Linux box say with a straight face that Microsoft has, or ever had, a monopoly on computer operating systems? I say, No, or at least, if they can say anything but No, I would have to hear what they mean by 'monopoly.' Usually, it seems that the anti-monopolists are really anti-preponderists (not a real word). People talk about barriers to entry in the OS market -- but if there's market demand (or one can be shown as likely to a venture capitalist, say), the work can be done. Linus obviously faced some barriers to entry, but look where Linux is, 10 years later! In fact, the only kinds of monopolies that seem to have much of a chance are those imposed by the government. Like local utilities (which as you point out, are in some cases being less regulated now), local telephone service (should have collapsed many years ago, but was protected by govt. regs), local cable service (same thing), the Post Office (favorite target, too easy)
But even with the monopoly on 1st-class, the Post Office doesn't have a legal monopoly on "information delivery" -- only a certain subset of it. You can still e-mail, or fax (over lines regulated by the FCC), smoke signal (EPA), or send radio broadcasts (FCC again).
As to the middle one, well, it doesn't look to me like competition is decreasing in the telecom industry. Just the opposite -- it's getting to be a very interesting field. Even the scope of what it encompasses is changing, both in the US and in the rest of the world. There are now redundant fiber networks which run all over the continental US, and more being layed all the time. How much does it cost to dial long distance vs. 15-20 years ago? Do you remember when you had to lease your phones from the phone company? [That's a good example of a monopoly, and why the Phone Company was a big target of '60s anti-establishment ire.]
I'm tired, and at work, and these arguments are made by others at greater length and with greater eloquence elsewhere, so I have to stop. But there are a lot of good books on the subject - the two that I would recommend off the top of my head as best representing the libertarian ideal would be
- The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek (I think 19
- The Future and its Enemies, by Virgina Postule (I think that's the name -- (former) editor of Reason). It's skimmable, and at the big bookstores (newly in paperback, in fact).
And for a bigger picture of monopolies and the wisdom of regulating natural / percieved monopolies, there is another really good book, called "Antitrust: A Policy at War with Itself" by --gulp -- Robert Bork. Bork is a smart, eloquent man. This is not to say that he is generally libertarian, though, because that's not the case.
Have a good day!
Tim
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Hear, hear... Completely agreed. This is a merger of interests, a conglomerate not a monopoly in any means. I would put it this way: AOL is gonna be to the Internet what Sony is to consumer electronics: an infrastructure company that has the content to attract people to its services and technologies. Nothing more, nothing less.
And that's probably not a bad thing --in the same way that Sony can throw the wight of its record labels behind MiniDisc and still not succeed in taking over the world, AOL-TW can throw its huge content libraries behind broadband services and the like and still not succeed. But, if AOL-TW tries to do that --and everything indicates that they will-- they have the clout/cash to make broadband affordable enough for the end consumer to sell their content on. But that doesn't mean that someone else (Sony?) will not be able to sell different content on the same infrastructure/network (actually the DoJ will probably guarantee that they will).
All in all, I think the TW take-over (call it like it is) is a good thing. Now, if AT&T took over T-W, that would be another can of worms...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
As others have pointed out, there is a fundamental difference between horizontal and vertical integration. MICROS~1 is dangerous to end-users (I avoid the term 'consumers') because they have a lock on a complete horizontal layer. AOL-T/W won't be the only way to get content; we can always watch MGM movies over RCN pipes and get our news from C|NET.
If AOL-T/W cut off CNN to non-AOL subscribers they'll feel it far more than we will. If they deny AOL subscribers access to the New York Times they'll just lose subscribers. If they only allow Warner Brothers movies over their pipes then they'll lose lots of subscribers. I don't think Case is that stupid.
It would be nice if JK did a little homework before preaching. The watershed case for the antitrust law of vertical integration was the Brown Shoe case back in (IIRC) 1952. Brown, with only 5% market share, wanted to merge to create a vertically integrated firm. Its competitors objected, because the increased efficiency would have cut into their profits, and the USDOJ blocked the merger. The USSC ruled that integration which threatened competitors but benefited consumers was not against the law; that harm to the consumer was required.
AOL-T/W may be objectionable for a lot of reasons (for that matter AOL is objectionable all on its own) but it's certainly not an antitrust matter either de jure or practically. What it will do is put pressure on other information marketing firms to get their act together in the face of a new standard of efficiency -- which IMHO we should all applaud.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
For one thing, Sprint runs the actual data network for AOL from offices in Reston and Herndon, VA. AOL/Time do not "own" their network, they use the Sprint network, thus breaking the "sky is falling" seemless link between the customers' dialup and the content.
Another thing, AOL is one of the few remaining "big" ISPs that has expanded how one can connect to the rest of the 'net. Example: while others were killing telnet connectivity AOL added it. One can also, easily, use any browser they choose with their AOL connection. I use Netscape while on AOL and use outside news servers for unfiltered ('cep by me) usenet. BTW, I have seen little need to view any AOL content, I have a choice and I do not need Johnny to exercise it for me.
No, not cheering for AOL/Time, just pointing out a few facts. I am sure if AOL began restricting content choices they would swiftly cease being the largest ISP in the world, in much the same way their competitors lost customers with little things like killing telnet.
Just my umbrella to the falling sky.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I think there is still enough diversity in media sources to keep things sane. The only Time/Warner owned media outlet I ever see is CNN. But I sure as hell don't use CNN as my only, or even main, source of news. Its no big thing, really.
More important is the fact that now AOL will be in control of RoadRunner cable modem service. But really is that any change from before? The cable companies have had government enforced monopolies since thier creation. While a vigilant anti-trust department is a reasonable precaution, I'd like to see it go to work on local municipalities' stranglehold on local utilities. The almost universal practice of granting exclusive access to single service providers, from telephones to cable to power, has generally been used to line the pockets of local officials and thier cronies, consumers be damned. Even places that ostensibly allow multiple licensees almost never get around to actually granting a second license. So our problem is not, as I see it, Big Business, so much as it is Little Government.
I bet Katz is just pissed that Time Magazine turned him down when he applied for a job reviewing records.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
They do present a roadblock. High speed access. Where I live, Multimedia Cablevision provides cable modem access through Road Runner. Road Runner, as I understand it, is owned by MediaOne which is in turn owned by Time Warner. Or perhaps TW owns RR directly now. At any rate, Cox Cable swallowed up Multimedia. They're currently contracted with @Home which, as most net savvy geeks are aware, suck donkey schlong. 128k upload caps, only one IP and other ill deeds. So since Multimedia got owned by Cox, there's a chance my pristine RR service may be switched to @Home. Southwestern Bell provides ADSL here but it's heinously expensive. Where's the choice? What other ISP's are allowed to share the cable and fiber lines to bring me net access? If this merger goes down, high speed access here will suck. Here and other places as well.
MSNBC is not the parent company of NBC. GE owns NBC. MSNBC is a separate cable company which is owned 50% by NBC and 50% by Microsoft, whose managerial control has been passed over to NBC. This is the same arrangement as DreamWorks Interactive, which is 50% owned by DreamWorks and 50% by Microsoft.
I'll note one thing for sure. Microsoft's dismal failures to divest itself in the entertainment industry--by it's failure to turn MSNBC into anything other than NBC's dumping ground for older programs ("Time Again", anyone), and for training young newscasters--should be illustrative of the learning curve in store for AOL managers as they find themselves in charge of something they Just Don't Get.
Have you called your local rr office yet? I did yesterday, and the guy assured me that I would not have to start using "AOL" and that it would remain "Road Runner". Now, this was just a regular customer service guy so he could be wrong, but you could at least check with your local office.
There's no way that we can tell for sure what will happen with the AOL-Time Warner merger. But you have to remember that there are millions of people who use AOL services (and those of Time Warner) that either don't care or don't know enough to see that there are other means of accessing information. Many computer users that I unfortunately must deal with only want their applications to run with no problems; many AOL users just want to be able to tell themselves and their friends that they are "online" because it's "cool." It could be called the dictatorship of the majority (does anyone know who coined that term?), and it's a scary to think that there will be one company with so much clout controlling the means of accessing information for people who just don't know any better.
It's true that the AOL-Time Warner congolmerate will most likely be forced to allow other companies to sell different information that will be delivered to users. Accessing the information is another story; many users won't want to make an effort to get to that information, though. (Think about the Dell WebPC commercial: "I was born to be bombarded by information.") On the same token, Apple just invested $200 million in EarthLink and agreed to make EarthLink the "default" ISP on all new Macs. All the new iMac owners who want to get online won't know the difference or care that there is one. They just want to be online because it's popular today. This passive process not necessarily a good thing.
America the birthplace of a free and independent press? Absolute rubbish! This mistake is the most important of the article - Katz implies that if AOL/Warner becomes effectively USAMedia(TM) then there will be no independent competition. That is absolutely false. The BBC remains an independent body, and BBC news is probably the most trusted in the world for that; which many British (and European) papers are owned by people with vested interests (Murdoch, for example) there are still many that are independent, and only offer a news service - the Guardian and Independent, for example.
Fine, this may mean that it is EVEN harder to get independent news IN THE USA, but that certainly doesn't mean the world, or the internet (which was international last time I looked!).
Geez, Jon sounds just like one of those Y2K extremeists that were just SURE that the world as we know it was about to end...now AOL and Time are a big threat to our freedom? Please...
This is all much ado about nothing. AOL has been acting like a media company for years - now they really are a media company. So what - there are still thousands of non-AOL ISP's out there. Time doesn't have a monopoly on anything that I can think of. Look at the bright side - at least pathfinder.com will FINALLY be put out of its misery.
Hey, LizardK:
...
... hope Steve Case isn't thinking "now *that's* over with, onto Andover.net ...)
whether they "make it hard" or not, you're right - the majority of these folks (20+ million and counting [maybe close to double that by the time this deal closes]) will likely spend the majority of their time within AOL-Time Warner's bounds.
The idea of this isn't appealing, and it seems clear that this will have a big effect on a good deal of the "mainstream" for some time to come. And not a positive one, but - as Dr. Katz insinuates - one that'll further "vanillize" general society.
Not to say that this won't all-out suck, but interesting things have a way of happening at the fringes - if it's a big fringe, there's more chance for the interesting. Plus the pendulum: When it swings back (3 years? 5?), shit could get good
The DIY bug is out there and will likely get stronger as more banal crap is posted at "Pathfinder II." Even if AOL-TW owned 98% of the eyeballs and content, it's still any bastard with $15 bucks (or less) a month can post their own site and get Slashdotted if it's worth seeing.
(oy
I'm just curious as to how Mr. Katz thinks AOL/Time Warner have broached the limits of what any free market society will take from corporations. All I see here is a strategic business strategy by AOL to allow itself to move onto broadband distribution of internet content. I mean, really, do you expect AOL to sit back and merely offer modem service while it loses a huge chunk of its customer base to faster cable/dsl services? And Time Warner have made the terrible mistake of taking a good deal when offered one.
Terrible. Horrific. But in all honesty I merely ask, why would the gov't staying out of this deal be a bad thing. Deregulation of the telephone industry is what allows us in the 90's to reap the benefits of competition. In the 80's when there was rampant regulation telephone service was expensive, and customer service was not a priority.
Competition does make the service and price better from the consumer, but is the best way to encourage competition to regulate the hell out of companies? Will the people falling behind the race catch up if you trip the leader? Possibly. But in the end what good will it do? I may not like AOL or the service they provide, but some people must for their subscriber base to be that high. And without them constantly searching for innovation to stay ahead of the pack, many of the services they offer might not be available to as many people.
I don't know about now, but up until a few years ago there were still places in america that couldn't get reliable service except from AOL. If AOL plans to bring broadband to all of America, how is that a bad thing? If nobody else is going to try and cash in on the goldmine this will be, then AOL deserves a monopoly.
And as I understand it, the main idea behind the merger is the bring the internet to even more people. What a terrible attack on free speech that is. I'm not planning on buying service from AOL/Time Warner directly, but I know quite a few people still on dialups who would enjoy it. And you can always bypass the AOL crap anyhow. We saw when customers demanded flat-rate instead of hourly service that even AOL cannot ignore its customers, and they never will be able to, with or without regulation.
Cheers
Sony could decide to buy them both...
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
All right then, explain Minnesota Govenor Jesse 'The Body' Ventura?
.sig: Now legally binding!
Umm....Time Warner is a very very large company that owns much much more than Time Magazine or Warner Brothers. Chances are they own most of the published that you come in contact with every day. Take whatever you watch and read and find out who owns it.
Ventura won because Minnesotans were sick of the same old thing. On the republican side we had a politcal actor who thinks he's todays version of Kennedy, on the democratic side we had the son of a famous politician who's worried that he isn't enough of a man.
/. readers would like.
Jesse got the young to get out and vote. He's a celebrity with a good personality. No one really gave him a chance, and he didn't win by much. His victory wasn't due to media manipulation (how many of you not from Minnesota even knew he was running?) or because Minnesotans are dumb.
Life really hasn't changed much since he became govenor. He's also Libertarian (my interpretation based on what he's done) which I think most
Ok this is the third time i have posted in this article, and the reaso is this. I am SO SICK of people bashing Jon Katz. I used to believe that slashdot was a place where people actually came in with onpe minds and recognized a decent perspective when they saw one.
What is the big deal? If you think the article is too long, DONT READ IT. If you don't agree, its no reason to bash the guy personally. He's an excellent author in my opinon, as well im sure as many others.
I had a friend (an attorney with two children) who was a damn smart person, but knew diddly about technology and the Internet. He was paying $50-$70 per month so his kids could research school work on the Internet and he still had to regulate their usage of the net due to the cost. He had no idea he could get unlimited access for about $20 per month until I gave him a list of ISP's in his area.
Now there is nothing wrong with capitalism, and preying on the ignorance of the public is no crime, but AOL abused the privilege IMHO.
Besides that, AOL has in the past made it extremely difficult to cancel service after you sign up for a "free" trial. They would have impossible hold times (over an hour) on the number you had to call to cancel your service. No online cancellation possible. Then the charge would appear on the credit card you had to give since you never could get through to cancel. Stuff like that...
Just wondering, but does this really affect us as much as J. Katz suggests? I generally don't read Time Magazine, and don't subscribe to AOL. Is "Warner" the same as that in "Warner Brothers"? In that case, I've probably watched some of their movies and TV shows. But they certainly aren't a big part of my world.
Now if, say, AOL bought MCI, or my local phone company (US West), THEN I'd start to get really nervous.
BZZZT! Wrong, but thank you for playing.
The idea behind a free press-- important enough to enshrine in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States-- is that liberty is best defeinded by a free press to report on the deeds of government and citizens alike. Free press is inextricably linked to free speech, the right of citizens to express their views without undue interference FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
The idea behing anti-trust law, which didn't come along until 1890 (although a strong argument can be made that there was no need for anti-trust and anti-monopoly law before the mid-1800's, as there was no big business) was that a large enough firm could harm consumers through restraint of trade, monopoly pricing, etc. I don't believe (although I don't have time to check right now) that free speech or free press are mentioned anywhere in the Sherman anti-trust act or related acts.
In fact, I cannot see any threat to either of the rights of free speech or free press in the combination of these firms. Certainly, the combined entity will be large. However, last time I checked, there ARE other outlets for news available to people. And, unless TimeWarnerAOL decide to send their own troops into the streets (which I think there would be opposition to, aside from the fact thai I don't think either firm has an armored division), I don't see the apocalyptic threat that Katz sees. Is the new entity AOL/Time-Warner/Department of Justice? No.
Jon often forgets, among many things (although he of all people should be thankful for this) that the right to a free press is not the implicit right of citizens to quality journalism. In fact, bad reporting is also protected. Thus, the dreck the Time and its ilk produce is just as protected as the dreck the Jon Katz constantly posts.
One more thing:
The juxtaposition of the two announcements was almost Biblical in its symbolism and significance:
Huh?
I've read a lot of Jon Katz articles and like any editorial writer sometimes I just don't get what motivates him to write what he does.
However this article about the dangers of allowing a megaconglomerate to control the creation and distribution of entertainment, says everything I want to say about why Jon Katz bashers strike me as short sighted and just plain complacent.
The moment I heard about an AOL/Time-Warner merger, the first thing that went through my head was: information monopoly alert!
Of course, like a driver going at 65mph in the driving rain, you'll understand what Katz is ranting about only when it hits you in the face.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
To a see a more objective article about the proposed merger check out the CNN article that explains it and the anti-trust fears that surround it. It is perhaps a bit less preachy and a little more informative than Katz's article
Katz just can't report the news without preaching. AT&T should have bought AOL awhile ago. AOL and Time Warner isn't all that bad. Katz loves to predict doomsday, "Today was the Net's darkest" etc, always throwing in something about how good Linux is. Calm down Katz, we'll live through this one yet.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
For an interesting take on Media Concentration, read Ben Bagdikian's "The Media Monopoly," or just about anything by Marshall McLuhan. As for who-owns-what, take a look at http://www.cjr.org , they have lists of which companies own which media outlets, etc.
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
Look-
/., he has a very good point. The people who lose here are the consumers and the employees. I believe Ted Turner decribed it as a sex-like experience when he signed away the future of his staff at Time Warner. Don't believe me? Ask the folks at Netscape where their careers went when AOL moved in. Case almost surely has something specific in mind for Time-Warner, much as he did for Netscape's "web portal", everything else will likely be tossed aside.
;-(
Regardless to personal comments about Mr. Katz which seems to abound on
The other really bad point is that AOL is about money, with very little focus on technology. The most consistant way to generate money on the net is through sales and advertising. Time-Warner subscribers are almost certain to be forced back into the AOL shell for at least network connectivity in order to provide the Publisher, AOL, with a window to spam you, probably kind of like the netzero and geocities java spamlet trash. They are almost certainly not above re-publishing their subscriber database information to marketing firms to help said firms fill your mailboxes every month... aren't you lucky? The used car salesman is marrying the media whore. There goes the neighborhood
"There are literally dozens of radion stations in virtually every US market." All owned by a few large megacorporations. "There are 6 broadcast television networks" Again, owned by a small number of megacorporations. "and lots ofindependant broadcasters," I watch a lot of TV and I've never seen any independent broadcasters. A good example is back in California, channel 9 was the "local" channel. But guess what, it's owned by Disney. It might look like an independant channel but guess what, it's not. There are a few channels owned by smaller corporations, but almost all are the property of a small number of giant transnationals. " over 500 cable channels," 500 channels owned by 5 giant corporations. "only a handfull of large book publishers but hundreds of small publishers", There is a pretty good amount of smaller publishers but until books began being sold over the net, it was extremely hard to find any of their books in the giant bookstores. At least it was for me. "hundreds of independent magazines and newspapers," I can't think of any magazines or newspapers that I know of that are independent, not any "mainstream" ones anyways. "and how many websites and small ISPs?" The net is different. Thank god for that.
Yes, there are lots of radio stations, tv stations, etc but that's not the point. Look at who controls them. The majority of our media is controlled by 10 corporations (it might even be less now). These corporations all have the similar interests. Do you really think you are going to hear critism of wars on NBC and CBS who are controlled by arms makers Westinghouse and General Electric. These media sources are not only controlled by the company that owns them but also by their advertisers interests. Not to mention the theory of "objectivity" in reporting (that all of the corporate media follows) which relies on official sources which are mostly the government and corporations. I recommend reading "The Media Monopoly" by Ben Bakdikian and "Manufacturing Consent" by Chomsky and Herman.
What many people seem to be missing here is the role that the media giants can take in undermining democracy. I'm not denying that the media are very important in maintaining democracy, but when a media mogul such as Rupert Murdoch (owner of the aforementioned British Sun and Times) chooses to try to influence events for their own reasons, then you can start to worry. 2 examples: Firstly, the Sun during the Gulf war advocated the use of nuclear weapons (!) - the only British newspaper to do so. A study by Sussex university showed that 21% of questioned Sun readers advocated nukes as a possible strategy - the only newspaper to make it into double figures. So obviously nuts editorials affect public opinion. Secondly, there is Murdoch's attitude to Europe. He is personally against Britain's further integration into Europe, mostly because he is afraid of further regulation. Perhaps he's right that no further regulation is required, but he is using his large ownsership of the British press to influence the process of democracy here, for his own financial reasons. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the press trying to sway political events - that's a cornerstone of democracy. But when one individual/corporation owns too large a proportion of the press, then democracy may be undermined by that individual. The only way to stop this happening is to prevent market share of a media organisation (more specifically a news gathering organisation) becoming too large. I know that it isn't as much of an issue in the USA, with greater competition, but that competition has lessened over the years of consolidation, and the interests of these new media giants tend to converge - woe betide the politician that tries to go against the common interests of several media giants.
The scary possibililty that the Time/Warner and AOL merger suggests is this:
AOL has control of the access to one medium for a huge number of people. Time/Warner will be providing the content for AOL, and it opens up the possiblility of manipulating people via that content. Compuserve useed to make it difficult to access the web, in the hope of restricting their subscribers to their own 'value added' sites. With such a huge media organisation this becomes must more easily accomplished.
Chris Wareham
I am a subscriber to Road Runner cable modem access. It's owned by Time Warner.
That now makes me a lousy AOLuser. Guess I have to start using all the smileys and faux leet speak.
Or I could go investigate DSL... hmmm...
That's just too much to wake up to.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
I definitely agree with him... on some aspects. It would definitely be a huge corporation, with the power to do almost anything it wanted... anything, that is, except control the software their customers run on.
I see it as just a huge ISP company joining a huge media company... no big deal there, but is it ME who still gets to decide how do I view their content, or whether to view it or not... after all, there's still a lot of other media companies, in the US and around the world. Remember, the net is, again, that which makes this possible.
It's totally different from Microsoft's bloated ambition... to control every electronic device you have or interact with... now that's scary.
I don't like AOL, and I'm not a huge fan of Time, either. Nor do I like monopolies. But Jon's doomsday predictions are premature; he's basing his assumptions on no-one else jumping on the megacontent bandwagon. This is not going to be the case; in the next few months -- certainly by the beginning of the next millennium -- we'll see many mergers being made. This time next year, there'll probably be four or five megacontent providers.
What does this mean for the consumer? I reckon it's a case of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Ten years ago we had media corporations that told us what the news was. The internet changed that -- temporarily. Now we're back into the same position, with the exception that it's easier to get alternative viewpoints. If I hear Dan Rather tell me about something that's happening in China, I can check out the South China Morning Post for an alternate view. However big the corporation get, I can't see that changing any time soon.
"If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running the world?"
Because corporations won't have the priviledges that they now possess. In today's world, governments grant charters to corporations, declaring them to be "legal entities". Because of this, the shareholders (owners) have no liability for the actions of their company.
In a proprietorship (non-corporate business), the owners are fully liable for their company. When the company get's sued, the owners are named in the suit. There are things a proprietorship may not legally do, that a corporation, even a two-man outfit, can.
A libertarian society is about liberty, not license. People are individually responsible for their own actions. But a corporation shields individuals from the consequences of their actions. And they can only do this through the help of the government.
But libertarians do not want "zero government control/regulation". The government has among its proper purposes the defense of the individual against theft and fraud. In a world with "minimal" regulation, they playing field is level. Individuals cannot hide behind their corporate shield. Shareholders are not forced to sell to the competitor just because the SEC says so. There is no eminent domain forcing the mom-and-pop coffeeshop to sell out to Donald Trump so he can build a new casino.
In a libertarian world, the only way a business can become a monopoly is to provide a service that everyone wants. If they start jacking their prices up because they have a natural monopoly, they will quickly lose it as competitors enter the market. And in a libertarian world, monopolies have no power to stop competition, so they have to behave themselves.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
You are absolutely correct that the monopolistic elements of this merger are completely different than Microsoft's. But it could be even more threatening.
Here's why: Microsoft's monopoly gives it an incredible amount of control over the IT industry that enables it to squeeze out competitive products, keeping prices up and lowering the quality of software available to John Q. Public. This is pretty bad, but realize it's pretty much limited to software.
Time Warner / AOL merger is about control of information. At the same time that the means of information distribution are becoming more global, bashing through cultural barriers (exporting American "culture" everywhere), the number of entities in control of the production of this information and content is shrinking rapidly to a small, oligopolistic group. So we've got an increasingly smaller number of entities controlling the information consumed by an increasingly large amount of the world. This scares me a lot more than OS choice.
The stakes here are much higher. It's easy to have a healthy, democratic society without cheap, effective computer software. It's much harder to have one without free communication and public awareness of critical issues. As the number of truly independent media outlets shrinks, the more sanitized, corporately correct and sensational our primary sources of information become.
So while AOL / TW doesn't have the absolute control over a single product that Microsoft does, it (along with Disney, GE, etc...) has a lot more control over a fundamental part of our society's basic infrastructure (the media) than any one entity should. Which we should all be very concerned about.
This is true offline. Why should it not be true online? I used to be with a small, local ISP and I must tell you that it was the most miserable ISP I have ever had to deal with. My chances of getting a connection were 1 in 2. Three hour connection limit. Lousy tech support. Busy signals all the time. I switched to one of the major ISP's (not AOL) and I am so much happier. I get 24/7 tech support, almost no busy signals, can stay connected as long as I want. Basically it offered everything that the tiny little company didn't. What is there not to like about that?
AOL and Time Warner, like Wal-Mart before it, will bring bigger, faster, more convienent internet to the masses! I'm not going to use their service because I don't like what AOL offers, but I really don't see anything wrong with making life easier for people, even if it does mean eliminating crappy competition.
The libertarian ethos of the Net resists government control or oversight, but that philosophy will be sorely tested by mergers like this one, which could make many nostalgic for the old Microsoft. The corporate move to acquire information, online and off, is a civic and an Internet menace. There hardly exists a free and independent journalistic culture off-line anymore. Time-Warner, Disney, GE, News America, Microsoft and Westinghouse have devoured too many of the country's most powerful media organizations.
I have to agree with Katz here. What do Libertarians think about this? The typical argument I see is that oligopolies and monopolies can't exist with government control (or making them legal, etc), and competition should increase without market controls, but I don't think that is true. If we really did have zero government control/regulation, what would stop a giant slug fest with the result being a few corporations basically owning and/or running the world?
I don't like a lot of what our government does but I think we need one to prevent exactly this type of scenario far before it reaches that point (think of sci-fi movies that look 25-50 to years into the future like Freejack).
I think our government has been moving twords the Libetarian ideal for a number of years now anyway, with deregulation. But look at the telecom industry, competition is decreasing, not increasing, and the industry is consolidating. Even in markets that have been opened up to competitors (such as mine) for the baby bells, not much has changed, DSL access is still spotty, etc. How do Libertarians respond to this?
Sorry, but I don't consider Jon Katz "libertarian". To be interested in liberty is to be interested in freedom. There is no freedom when there is Only One "right" opinion. This ain't Highlander, and There Can't Be Only One around here. Anyone with a -real- claim to libertarianism knows that.
Why, then, do I leave Jon Katz' checkbox checked? Because I believe that it's worth hearing other people's opinions. Sometimes, in all the dross, there are some real gems. (In general, though, IMHO Slashdot is mostly gems. The dross, though, goes past being real and through the other side.)
Besides, sometimes he says some really meaningful stuff. Just from a mindspace I'd hate to be in.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder how much of the Western world's media is now concentrated into the hands of Time/Warner and News International. Forget monopolies based on commodities(Microsoft, etc), domination of information dissemination is the *really* scary prospect.
... And if you don't believe me, look at UK elections following the Falklands war. The jingoism and patriotic bullshit spouted by the media ensured Margaret Thatchers's return to power despite the appaling state of the economy.
Given the partisan nature of newspapers like The Sun (backed up by a slightly more erudite Times that sings the same tune), it's got to the point where media moguls can swing the outcome of elections
Chris Wareham
One of the darkest days for the net? I think that is a bit ridiculous, quite frankly. I don't have any problem with these companies merging. It may well make for a better bottom line, which is a major objective of corporations. I think they have a perfect right to merge as they see fit. If the government would get out of a lot of this stuff (that includes using its monopoly on force in enforcing bogus intellectual property laws for 95 years or more), things would be a lot better.
On what principle do you operate to say that the government should prevent this? Government creates more problems than it solves here. Now, I disagree fundamentally with libertarians on some issues, but regarding goverment jumping into this sort of thing, I am more or less in agreement with them. I think a reasonable argument can be made to sanction or even break up a company after wrongdoing is discovered, but I am very uncomfortable with disallowing voluntary mergers before the fact.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
Yes the details of this meager should be scrutinized with a fine tooth comb, but by no means does it foreshadow doomsday. It is yet another media/entertainment mega-corp, but so what there are at least a dozen others out there. If this deal is that dangerous, what about things like MSNBC? That put's Micorsoft, NBC and GE all in one bed.
There are plenty of competitors in the internet/media arena that provide both service and content.
One potentially interesting outcome is that AOL has been fighting to access to other companies cable modem networks. Will they now have to open up the cable networks that Time/Warner owns, or end up looking like hipocrites?
Katz says:
AOL/Time-Warner plans to be the world's largest corporation
They have quite a ways to go in order to be the World's largest corporation (though this is definitely the largest merger ever).
Microsoft $576.6 billion
General Electric 496.5
Cisco Systems 362.2
Wal-Mart 305.1
Exxon-Mobil 293.3
NTT 287.3
Intel 274.0
AOL-Time Warner 261.0
Vodafone-Mannesmann 261.0
MCI Worldcomm-Sprint 223.7
Royal Dutch-Shell 218.7
Pfizer-Warner Lambert 207.8
Ummm. nevermind, last time I did that I was marked down as a troll...
Let's face it. One of the great debates over the internet ever since AOL hooked up it's bulliten board is "How do we get away from these idiots?"
Thanks to the merger, we may soon be free.
AOL will be able to offer a lot of content and special deals. They will be able to let you buy your new GM car and check out the TV guide listings. In short, you'll be able to do all the mundane things that the internet is so good at without ever having to go to the actual internet!
And this my friends solves our problem. It's already easy enough to identify people using AOL. This can be done by checking the IP address using Perl or Java and then redirecting people to a "404 page". This has been done by a number of webmasters already due to the actions of numerous AOL users. (Links will not be provided in order to protect identities.)
Soon we can envision two internets. AOL and the old Internet. As usual, AOL will not share the majority of it's content with us, and some of us will not share out content with them (see above). However the tourists will start to fade away as we cease to offer them the lowbrow contents they so greatly desire.
P.S. No, my site is still available to Aol users as it's the only way my parents (both AOL users)can see their grandson.
No Zen is good zen
At least, AOL Australia is. See this news report from the Sydney Morning Herald. Not promising.
AOL is running scared that they will be locked out of the cable internet market. That, and I suspect that alone, is why they're buying Time Warner. Time Warner owns extensive cable systems - I believe they are the number two cable company in the US. AT&T is the largest, now that they've bought TCI. AOL must be afraid that their efforts to get AT&T to open up their cable systems won't be successful.
This isn't very good for AOL financially in the short term. They are being widely downgraded, because the new AOL TIme Warner will almost certainly have a lower growth rate than AOL by itself. Only fear could have motivated a stunt like this.
AOL has no interest in running a TV/movie studio/network. There isn't much added value in owning both TV/film and Internet properties. This isn't about TV/Internet convergence.
AOL Time Warner is not a vertical monopoly any more than Time Warner or AOL were by themselves. AOL is one of the few internet companies with a steady, regular income, and this is because they are not especially involved in the content industry. They are an ISP - a very successful one. Time Warner is completely hamstrung by FCC regulations - they can't stop showing TV shows from competing studios on their networks, nor will they stop selling WB programmes to competing networks. CNN will still be seen on AT&T cable systems, and AOL doesn't open Time Warner up to new sources of TV or film content. AOL will continue to host websites and marketing for competing studios and TV networks. They recently signed a deal with PBS to carry some of their web content.
AOL and Time Warner will still have completely separate management structures. AOL has no background in mass media, and has no great reason to try to acquire some.
I will bet that a few years down the line, AOL will spin off the TV and film studios and the TV networks and just keep the cable infrastructure. That's the only part of Time Warner that makes any sense as a part of AOL.
The two announcements (AOL and IBM) are not diametrically opposed, as Jon suggests. In fact, they are perfectly aligned. Check this out...
The AOL TW merger shows that this new behemoth would be the King of Content on all media.
The adoption of Linux by the waning Kinng of Hardware suggests that open source is the way of the future. Open hardware is sure to follow open software eventually, though not without strong opposition from the patent and trademark holders.
But, the people in control of proprietary hardware are sure to get a clue from the AOL TW super-entity. Content is the new commodity.
Linux has taken away the means, of controlling the means, of producing content. The Internet has given any Joe Shmoe the means to distribute it. The Computer has given everyone the tool to create content. Content is the new commodity.
To make any money, and have any power, you have to control CONTENT, not how it's made, not how it's distributed. It's economies of scale in the context of content.
AOL TW can out-content EVERYONE now. They can producte is faster, in greater volume, due to their bulk. They can distribute it faster and more cheaply. They can shout louder and longer than anyone else. With the exception of the occasional "I kiss you" and a little hampsterdance, nobody will have the opportunity to get unbiased media, simply because of the volume (yes, I mean it both ways) of AOL TW.
Now were back to the old days. Hammers and chisels (Linux) are free. It takes talent to be Michelangelo - and he died piss poor.
It's now all about the production of content. Technology is free and plentiful, and we're all free to use it. But, just because you have freedom of speach (or tech) does not mean you have anything intelligent to say. Or worse yet, you do, but nobody wants to hear it because AOL TW is showing interactive Jerry Springer.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
It seems to me this merger is a profound validation of the very things slashdot readers value.
Remember AOL bought Time/Warner, not the other way around. That means AOL's internet presence is more valuable than the sum of all the many properties that make up Time/Warner Bros./CNN/HBO et. al.
Time/Warner doesn't need distribution, it already owns cable properties. It has gobs of content to put on those cable lines, nonetheless, it agreed to be purchased by a company with revenues only a third as large as itself!
This changes the valuation of everything, all internet companies are more valuable immediately, the future really is the internet, not magazines, television, cd's, movies, or any of the old media.
And That is a Good Thing (tm) because it is us who will create that future - we have very little access to older media forms, we don't own magazines, movie studios, record labels, television channels, etc. - but we are creating their replacements, and this merger shows that what we are creating is more valuable than what currently exists.
Ultimately what happened here is Time/Warner, the largest, most powerful, media company in the world agreed to be bought by an internet startup, in order to get better access to the internet, (read: to the future.) For without that access, that presence, they realized they would not be players in that future.
In terms of monopoly fears, Case and Levin announced that they would be supporting open access to their cable lines for isp competition, as soon as the exclusive contract with @home/excite ends next year, so we will be able to pick our isp over our cable modem, it need not be AOL/Time. Furthermore, Time/Warner is not the only source of content in the world, not even a third of it, this means the other content providers will be looking to partner with internet companies quickly, for fear of being left out.
We have created the future, in places like slashdot - AOL is nothing without it's subscribers, creating a dynamic little world - much like slashdot, albiet in a narrower way. I am looking forward to it, the reigns of power are in our hands now.
Alekzandr
Hold on a second here. Comparing AOL to MS is not really fair to AOL. I dont like AOL personally, but AOL has succeeded on the strenght of it's product and the strength of it's marketing and brand name. The reason AOL is number one is because they have never stopped giving free CD's away, they have never stopped improving the software to give people what they (seemingly) want, they have never stopped making their service easier or flashier. They sell their product for what it is, and people buy it for what it is. People are not forced to use AOL, they choose to use AOL. Any person with half a brain and a newspaper can find more economical (if not harder to use) Internet service for a fraction of what AOL charges without losing one bit of functionality or interoperability with the people who are on AOL. AOL has played about as fair as any mega-corp is going to play the game.
As for Time Warner, There are loads of other HUGE media organizations in this world that behave much more foolishly. Let's talk about Disney and censorship. Let's talk about Sony and closed standards.
As for broadcasters/cable/sattelite services, Time Warner is hardly the only one out there. In fact where I used to live Time Warner sold to AT&T. There's PLENTY of other competion out there in the form of cable and sattelite companies. Not to mention FOX/ABC/NBC/CBS.
Yes AOL Time Warner will be huge, they might also be evil, but they're not a monopoly.
-Rich
I seem to remember when Sony purchased MCA/Universal a few years back and created Sony Pictures, that the exact same things were said about that merger: that Sony would own the entire supply chain in entertainment from artistic development to movie theater distribution. Of course there was no "internet" back then to speak of, so of course almost no-one here will remember that.
*Everyone* worried about Sony, and using virtually the same exact argument that Katz used: that by owning the entire supply chain, Sony would rule the world. Sony (and by extension "Japan Inc.") would completely dominate entertainment, and completely wipe out any American participation in what is the largest sector of our economy in California: entertainment.
So why isn't this a Sony world? Why isn't every movie we see, every television show we watch, every band we listen to a Sony branded title? Why aren't we watching movies in Sony theaters using Sony A/V equipment eating Sony branded popcorn and Sony branded cola, as the pundits of the time predicted?
Simple.
First, at the time, Sony only understood electronics. Sony's management didn't (and still) don't get entertainment--and for five years the Japanese board of directors attempted to micromanage Sony's entertainment devisions like they did Sony's electronics division. And they floundered. Eventually Sony so screwed up the entertainment divisions that they had to divest themselves of some of the entertainment assets, and re-hire the American corporate heads they originally canned during the merger. So while today Sony still owns Sony Pictures, creates a few television shows, and are present in a big way in the music industry, they do so in fairly independant divisions who compete with each other as much as they cooperate.
The second reason why Sony didn't wipe out other entertainment groups was because anti-trust laws and good business sense didn't permit Sony from locking out non-Sony product from the Sony pipeline, or from preventing non-Sony companies and individuals from purchasing Sony services and equipment. That is, a movie produced by Fox has just as much chance to get shown at a United theater as a movie produced by Sony, on largly the same terms. In order for a horizontal company (a company such as Sony with a large number of holdings in a large number of different industries) to survive, they cannot rely on only themselves as a customer. Otherwise, how successful do you think a Sony Playstation would be if only Sony employees could buy one?
I think Sony is an extremely instructive example as to the future of AOL/Time Warner. It's pretty clear to me that the AOL managers only understand the Internet--their success in doing other forms of content production has been poor at best. By and large most of the content AOL has produced for their service has been produced by others--since AOL went to a flat-rate price structure they have produced almost no original content. And what content AOL has tried to produce hasn't exactly been all that stunning in the first place--more like "feel good" content which played well to the press while AOL's users bypassed it to descend into sex-related chat rooms.
And anyone who has followed the Babylon 5 news groups knows that Time Warner is operated as a bunch of independant little fifedoms--very much the same way Sony now operates. So it's not like the different divisions within Time Warner cooperate towards taking over the world in the first place.
Me, I don't think the AOL/Time Warner merger spells bad news for anyone. Except perhaps for the AOL/Time Warner employees who will get laid off over the next five years as the whole conglomerate downsizes as the AOL managers learn the right way to do media.
The reason the Microsoft monopoly was so much more dangerous is because it was a horizontal monopoly. In essence, a roadblock that everyone had to go through. The merger between AOL and T/W does not represent the same type of threat. There is no roadblock I need to go through. With a vertical monopoly, I can simply go elsewhere. Not a threat at all.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!