Media mergers give cause for concern

Scientists For Global Responsibility Newsletter, Autumn 2000
Felix Grant, James Putnam, William McRostie point out the possible effects on freedom of information that could result from a service provider monopol

The third wave information revolution is now beginning to break around our daily world. As it does so, it drives formerly well-understood organisational vessels into uncharted waters. New and untried business models spontaneously generate, race ahead of lumbering regulatory mechanisms, then either sink, shapeshift, or merge with others. The ultimate results of these changes are impossible to predict; the best we can mange is a myopic peering at likely immediate impacts on the microscale. A year is a long time in this environment; a decade hence is an unimaginably mythic time of heroes and villains, utopias and catastrophes. The industrial revolution was in slow motion, by comparison

Like all revolutions, this one demands decisions for which we must be responsible. The tree of liberty, as Jefferson reminded us, is a fragile plant. If his talk of refreshing its roots with blood is excessively dramatic for the present case, we nevertheless live in days when we must practise eternal vigilance as never before: censorship is death to social responsibility, and requires only that individual women and men do nothing to oppose it. Science is, in essence, information; biotech, the current crucible of scientific morality, is information; and information is globalisation. Scientists are at the wavefront of the revolution, and if they would be globally responsible they must look to the integrity of those arteries along which the information flows.

What, for example, are the implications of such media business mergers as that between Internet online provider AoL (America On Line) and publishers Times-Warner, for uncensored academic intercourse? Peering through the maelstrom, in the uncertain light of past experience, there appear to be three main avenues of potential risk: content, means of exchange, and indexing. The first and second are simply updated faces on old problems, relatively open to scrutiny; the third is in some ways new and insidious.

Restriction of content and the means of transmission have a long history. A relatively recent example of restriction by merger acquisition lies, appropriately enough, in the family tree of the AoL-Time-Warner entity itself. Chomsky and Herman^[1] describe an occasion when a small publisher was set to issue a book which questioned actions and values of the US military -industrial complex; Warner acquired the smaller concern in a takeover and axed the offending title before publication. Whether such heavy handed suppression was worth the expenditure is questionable. Chomsky and Herman's account through another publishing group with a different agenda probably reached a far greater readership than the suppressed book would have managed - and the suppression itself gave a gloss of enhanced credibility. 

Technology and economics have their own dynamic that tends to undermine the efficacy of suppression. To lock up or to burn books was an effective measure when books were rare and expensive, readers far and few between. Such measures became progressively more difficult to apply (and required increasing levels of collateral repression) with the introduction of moveable type, powered mass printing, widespread literacy, the typewriter, the duplicator, the photocopier. Samizdat and the fall of the USSR, de Gaulle's use of radio against the colons, the role of the audio cassette in overthrowing Iran's Shah ... all of these illustrate the declining rate of return on such a crude approach to censorship. The Internet, designed to be a self-healing structure capable of surviving and circumventing massive infrastructure losses in nuclear war, implemented by a myriad competing nodes, is less realistically tameable in the long run than any preceding medium. At least two powerful dictatorial regimes have spectacularly failed to control net borne information leakage past their borders; one (the USSR) has paid the price of its own existence, the other (China) is evolving to survive unavoidable transparency. If these two could not pull the trick in a geographically self -contained context, it seems unlikely that more diffuse and decentralised commercial organisations will succeed.

There is, of course, that other threat to content which is known as "dumbing down", but this is a function of large scale media, not large scale monopolistic ownership. A single provider is no more likely to cut costs at the expense of intellectual variety than a competing market; and smaller speciality providers have shown a tenacious tendency to emerge as information systems go global. This is, in any case, not an area where science can exert much control.

Indexing, however, is a different matter. It, too, is progressively more important in the explosive informational environment of the Internet than in preceding media How would you ever find anything at all, in your computerised world of information, without search and indexing tools? Polish polymath Stanislav Lem, on numerous occasions in text and film, expressed the danger early on: 

"..what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?"^[1]

What, indeed? Nobody can honestly offer long -term answers in such a fast -changing environment, least of all the authors who differ widely in their reading of the runes. On the immediate dangers and the apparent solutions, if not the balance between them, they nevertheless find themselves in accord: the freedom or censorship of the Internet depends upon the real, not apparent, plurality of search engines and other indexing tools in use.

There are about thirty thousand Web search engines or other indexing sources easily found, and many times that number with some effort, but most users rely upon only one. For an overwhelming majority of users, this one source will be drawn from a very small pool of half a dozen engines or less. For most, that one will be the option presented to them by their point of entry to the Web, and therein lies the rub: a dominant portal will, by definition, dominate the choice of paths which users habitually take across the immeasurably huge sea of data. If a page, term or topic is not indexed (for whatever reason) by the chosen system, it will never be found. 

Multiple search and metasearch tools dilute this dominance, but only to a degree. The excellent and widely used Copernic, for instance, accesses 14 sources - but most of these are from the same subset of "big name" engines that most individuals will use in any case. Implicit censorship of some of those engines will be sidestepped, but a consensus amongst them all (or even most) could still significantly depress access. Other metasearchers are potentially more insidious still; they offer the apparent impartiality of multiple access, yet choose the points of that access and are under the direct control of the portal or provider which supports them. Such programmes rely upon regular updates; there is no way in which a user could be easily aware of deliberate or inadvertent censorship introduced via those updates, should such a thing ever occur. 

None of the authors believes that a conspiracy towards such indexing deformity exists; but the theoretical potential certainly does. Designed search tests reveal a definite asymmetry in hits related to topic, which varies from engine to engine. A conspiracy is not impossible, and unintentional bias is inevitable. While plurality is maintained, the bias will vary and normal discourse will disseminate material despite these biases; a sufficient market dominance by one provider, however, will inevitably skew sampling pathways. A future near monopoly might, hypothetically, go further, making temptation to conscious censorship irresistible. 

This, then, is the red light above mergers such as AoL-Time-Warner. AoL provides the point of access for more users than any other provider. If academic users experience an urge to feel superior about this, they should restrain it; as the AoL user base has expanded, it has brought within it many of their fellows. Dominating the provider market also means dominating the choices of index resources. With the Time-Warner-AoL merger, this access dominance is allied to a powerful producer of content. It would be astonishing if the result were not, through convenience if nothing else, a further skewing of the indexed base in the long run.

None of this need be terminal; nor should it be dismissed. The outcome lies in the hands of users, and at the mercy of wider socioeconomic inertial forces. The world is changing in many ways, and the meaning of words change with it. Do words "competition or monopoly" or "antitrust" mean the same thing now, in an increasingly globalize world, as they did in the days of national supremacy? 

A recent Washington Post column by Robert J. Samuelson argues that in 1890, when US antitrust laws were written, competition meant price competition but:

"...today's most significant competition doesn't involve identical products sparring over price. It involves rival technologies struggling for superiority.... For most technologies, standards are vital. Without them, mass markets are impossible. Sometimes standards arise by voluntary agreements... sometimes from the triumph of one or a few firms. The check on the dominance ... is the threat of a new technology." 

Alongside this, Thomas L. Friedman (in the New York Times) is one of many who argue that size in itself is less important to the balance of freedom and efficiency than relative or proportional size within the arena. How big or absolute will a monopoly need to be, in order to survive, maintain competition, or pose a threat to competition, in the emerging global info-economy? We don't know; what is certain is that the potential risks are greater if we, as consumers, are lazy or accepting than if we press informed demands upon our suppliers.

Scientists are well placed to act as one body of self -appointed guardians in this way. They rely upon free flow of information in order to function; but their efficient functioning is also vital to the corporations that may seek to dominate. Use a multiplicity of search and index facilities, not just the one that is to hand. Make regular searches for contentious viewpoints in your area of expertise, especially if you disagree with them ... if you are a gene scientist, for instance, how easy is it to find the views of those who call you the antichrist? If you can't find them, you may feel relieved but you should really be worried. Remember the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller: 

"I didn't speak up ... Then they came for me - and there was nobody left to speak up for me."

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1. Lem, Stanislav. His master's voice. 1983, San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151403600. (Polish: Glos pana.)
2. Chomsky, N. and Herman, E.S. The Washington connection and Third World fascism. 1st ed. 1979, Boston, South End Press. 0896080919

The authors:
Felix Grant is an academic and research consultant based in Europe.
James M Putnam is an information systems analyst in the USA.
William McRostie is a lawyer with a particular interest in Internet issues, in the USA.