Death of the "Free Internet Myth"

The purpose of this study is neither to provide the reader with worstcase scenarios, nor to claim that the ultimate future of the Internet has to be that pessimistic. It is to point to main areas, where we see problems that might endanger the promising Internet freedom and that might be at certain point dealt with.

It is not the information superhighway as it was declared in the mid 1990s anymore. It is not even referred to as this information highway today as it used to be in the past. It is more about commerce that is transforming this fast moving medium. For example, in 1995 the term “information super highway”, coined by then vice-president Albert Gore, was mentioned in 4,562 stories in U.S. newspapers. In comparison, “e-commerce” was mentioned only 915 times. Two years later there were 2,812 articles about electronic commerce and 1,314 reports mentioning the information super highway (Solomon, 2000: 3). [47] At that time, 100 million people all around the world were already connected to the Internet (Brody, 2002: 249) [10], which shaped itself as the global mass multimedium. In 2000 Washington Post used the term ten times less than of the amount it used in the 1990s (Solomon, 2000: 3) [47]. More and more the Internet is focused on commerce and more and more is it part of business strategies of the leading media and cyberspace conglomerates. And that logically effects the distribution and composition of the content.

The primary idea in Internet was to shift from liberal post-industrial debate to the neoliberal concepts of “friction-free capitalism” and academic debates transubstantiated to postcultural cyber theories and new media political economy. David Lyon says that our society “materialized into surveillance society, wherein citizens are monitored and controlled both by governments and commercial interests”. He concludes that cyber-sociality is limited by constraints in the form of technologies and new evolving social norms. It is the present commerce-versus-commons model where the commercial interests attempt to reign in non-commercial entities through the above mentioned technological and social constraints. Including, but not limited to, collusion by portals and search engines, illegal downloading and copyright infringement, bypassing of regulatory mechanisms (Shade, 2003: 131) [44].

In the 1960’s, Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village”, a metaphor through which he tried to predict the development of the media. And his idea became reality – from the point of view of the spread of information, the world today certainly resembles such a “global village”. In this “global village”, the media are the primary source of information, news, and entertainment. This is also one of the many aspects of globalization. However, McLuhan´s theories are often criticized because they indirectly support the interest of media conglomerates. His propositions namely supported the interests of telecommunication and broadcasting companies as they meant a considerable promotional asset (Reifová, 2004: 309-310 [41], Ondrášik, 2006 [36]).

Almost ten years ago, Steven Harris forecasted this process and called it straightforwardly: “The greatest stumbling block to realizing Internet (freedom) utopia is that we all continually conflate the terms 'democracy' and 'free market'”. He pinpoints that the truth about this so-called free markets is: large companies dominate the best advertising venues, to buy up retail
outlets and monopolize distribution, offer dumping price products, and thus narrow the spectrum of competitors in the market, even the cyberspace market. “Naturally, corporate enterprise is licking its chops at the prospect of such a far-flung shopping mall of consumers, but individual freedom is not the main attraction”. “Hardware and Software monopolies like IBM and Microsoft will hold users hostage to their endless game of planned obsolescence” (Harris, 1997: 7) [21]. In particular, this prognosis was proven to be accurate in the case of Microsoft. For example as the software giant used its monopoly and dominance in the field of the operating systems of computers. In this monopoly was also about accessing the Internet and the use of their browser Internet Explorer software. Ironically even after that decision, this browser is still hardly removable from Windows run computer
operating systems and the company was not broken up. In this marketplace of ideas the information and ideas are part of commodification. At the end only the market share counts. And, as we will try to prove, the larger the marketplace the less market players are present.

CONCLUSIONS [9]

The purpose of this paper is not to cast doubt or challenge the importance of Internet and its openness for business, entrepreneurships, the dynamic market movement and advantages for costumers through the e-commerce or the technological advancement associated with it. Task of this study is to pose some critical questions about the direction where the Internet is heading. In which areas is its freedom challenged and even endangered, where the communication and content production flow distorted is. The purpose is to challenge the myth that Internet is ultimately free and does not need regulation or laws governing it.

The power of cyberspace giants and concentration of industry ownership has impacted heavily on Internet and power accumulated in hands of these companies could be immense. That these companies distort the content, are involved in the process of gate-keeping and select information is already taking place and will evolve even more as the examples from broadcast industry show. As the statistics show, Internet is more and more in hands of handful companies that are virtually unregulated compared with other media industries like television or print. The public interest standards over the Net simply do not apply. However I mean regulation that will serve to preserve the diversity not to limit the free communication flow. The question is can we really develop effective regulation that will achieve this purpose? Is it even technologically possible?

Most of the conceptions from the broadcast industry are not applicable in the vast Internet environment but that does not mean the antitrust regulation should be exempt from this area, e.g as Google dominates almost half of the search engines market and growing. The conceptualization of effective regulation and how to adapt media ownership to this new digital age is part of many researches of scholars and academicians. Some executive bodies, like the European Commission are taking constructive approach in regulation of the Web. One of those is to regulate the video stream on the Internet with the reform of Television Without Frontiers directive or rating the Internet content in an effort to protect children.

The regulation is even more sensitive in the area of the Internet without affecting the free communication and information flow and technological advancement. We have to keep in mind that the Internet too, as other types of media are, can be a merit good - good whose value exceeds the valuation an individual would place upon it. And the markets alone simply cannot solve the problem of keeping the Web content diversified and free. The commerce versus commons model has created tensions in cyberspace.

Another area is U.S. dominance over the Internet that influences the international and global communication flow. Solutions to this issue could me more state subsidies to various local Internet entrepreneurs and diversified Internet content with funded projects and encourage the technological development.

Democratic culture means to have a fair opportunity to participate in social and civic activities, it is also crucial to have the same access to freedom of speech. The so much discussed net-neutrality has to be preserved so the equal Internet access stays in place.

The states, regulatory authorities and international institutions should finally crack down on e.g. Internet child pornography or hate sites and develop effective tools in protecting the children.

On the other hand the Internet cannot be allowed to be enslaved by copyright issues and with that associated interests of large companies. There has to be a clearly stated standard line between intellectual property rights and harassment of Internet users. One of the workable concepts could be that demonstrated in Wealth of Networks by Dr. Benkler to support more open-source users generated content.