The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

Even if the players weren’t from Stanford and Harvard (two institutions where Lessig has held prominent appointments), the statement would still be unsettling. Who could possibly construe a contest between the dropouts of these elite and storied institutions as one between underdogs and an oppressor? And why should we cheer Amazon over local bookstores, Apple over independent record labels, or Netflix over art house cinemas, on the basis of their founding date or their means of delivery? The dinosaurs and upstarts have more in common than Lessig cares to admit.

As Woodrow Wilson famously said, “That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.” Although new-media celebrants claim to crusade on behalf of the “yeoman creator,” they treat the kings of the digital domain with unwavering reverence, the beneficence of their rule evident in the freedom that their platforms and services allow. Praising the development of what he calls “hybrid economies,” where sharing and selling coexist, Lessig argues that advances in advertising will provide adequate support for the creation and dissemination of culture in a digital age. “As if by an invisible hand,” the ways we access culture will dramatically change as the dinosaurs “fall to a better way of making money” via hyper-targeted marketing.

Lessig is deeply concerned about control of culture and appalled that a generation has been criminalized for downloading copyrighted content, yet he ignores the problem of commercialism and is sanguine about the prospect of these same youth being treated as products, their personal data available for a price.23 Though the reviled traditional broadcast model evolved the way it did to serve the interests of advertisers, Internet enthusiasts brush away history’s warnings, confident that this time will be different.

Going against the grain of traditional media critics, Lessig and others believe that the problem is not commercialism of culture but control. The long-standing progressive critique of mass media identified the market as the primary obstacle to true cultural democracy. When General Electric acquired NBC, for example, the CEO assured shareholders that the news, a commodity just like “toasters, lightbulbs, or jet engines,” would be expected to make the same profit margin as any other division. But art and culture, the critical line of thought maintains, should be exempt, or at least shielded, from the revenue-maximizing mandates of Wall Street, lest vital forms of creativity shrivel up or become distorted by the stipulations of merchandising—an outlook that leads to advocating for regulations to break up conglomerates or for greater investment in public media.

Internet enthusiasts, in contrast, tend to take a laissez-faire approach: technology, unregulated and unencumbered, will allow everyone to compete in a truly open digital marketplace, resulting in a richer culture and more egalitarian society. Entertainment companies become the enemy only when they try to dictate how their products are consumed instead of letting people engage with them freely, recontextualizing and remixing popular artifacts, modifying and amending and feeding them back into the semiotic stream.

When all is said and done, the notion of a hybrid economy turns out to be nothing more than an upbeat version of digital sharecropping, a scenario in which all of us have the right to remix sounds and images and spread them through networks that profit from our every move. The vision of cultural democracy upheld by new-media thinkers has us all marinating in commercial culture, downloading it without fear of reprisal, repurposing fragments and uploading the results to pseudo-public spaces—the privately owned platforms that use our contributions for their own ends or sell our attention and information to advertisers. Under this kind of open system, everything we do gets swept back into a massive, interactive mash-up in the cloud, each bit parsed in the data mine, invisible value extracted by those who own the backend.

In a way, this is the epitome of what communications scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture”—the melding of old and new media that the telecom giants have long been looking forward to, for it portends a future where all activity flows through their pipes. But it also represents a broader blurring of boundaries: communal spirit and capitalist spunk, play and work, production and consumption, making and marketing, editorializing and advertising, participation and publicity, the commons and commerce. The “old rhetoric of opposition and co-optation” has been rendered obsolete, Jenkins assures us.24 But if there is no opposition—no distinction between noncommercial and commercial, public and private, independent and mainstream—it is because co-optation has been absolute.

Though she now tours under her own name, the Portland-based musician Rebecca Gates long fronted the Spinanes, a band that, in the nineties and early aughts, released three albums on the influential Sub Pop label. She had, in many ways, the classic indie rock experience, playing clubs around the country, sleeping on couches, getting aired on college radio and MTV’s 120 Minutes. Sub Pop provided advances for the band to make records and tour support, and though the albums never sold enough copies to recoup, the label made it possible for Gates to devote herself to her craft. Then, after a hiatus of ten years, Gates finished a new record and went back on the road, but this time she self-released her music, taking advantage of the low cost of digital distribution. Gates was cautiously optimistic that she could end up better off than under the old model—that the enterprise may be more sustainable and satisfying—even if she sold fewer copies in the end.

Gates thought a lot about the new opportunities offered by technology as part of a project undertaken in partnership with the Future of Music Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of independent artists, lobbying for everything from health care to community radio. She led an ambitious survey of working musicians to see how they had actually fared as the recording industry transforms. “It’s really easy to get hung up on success stories,” Gates told me, referencing appealing anecdotes about creators who “made it” by leaving their record labels and going viral online or by giving their music away and relying on touring income or T-shirt sales. Gates discovered it was hard to generalize about people’s experiences. “I’ve seen hard data for people who are in successful bands, quote unquote, festival headlining bands, who would make more money in a good retail job,” she said.

“There’s this myth that’s not quite a myth that you don’t need intermediaries anymore,” Gates continued. But it is harder than it seems for artists like Gates to bypass the giants and go solo, directing traffic to their own Web sites, though that’s what many artists would prefer to do. “Let’s imagine your record is done, that somehow you paid for production and you’re in the clear—then immediately you’re in a situation where you are dealing with iTunes, which takes thirty percent, and if you are small and you go through a brokerage, which you sometimes have to do, you can lose fifty percent.” Artists who do work with labels, big or small, often end up getting less from each digital sale.

A similar arrangement applies to streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, which have come under fire from a range of working musicians for their paltry payouts. The four biggest major labels have an equity stake in Spotify and receive a higher royalty rate than the one paid to independent artists and labels (one independent songwriter calculated that it would take him 47,680 plays on Spotify to earn the profit of the sale of one LP25). “As far as I can tell, there’s been this replication of the old model,” Gates said. “There’s a large segment of the tech platforms that are simply a replacement for any sort of old label structures except that now they don’t give advances.”

During this crucial moment of cultural and economic restructuring, artists themselves have been curiously absent from a conversation dominated by executives, academics, and entrepreneurs. Conference after conference is held to discuss the intersection of music and new media, Gates notes, but working musicians are rarely onstage talking about their experiences or presenting their ideas, even as their work is used to lure audiences and establish lucrative ventures, not unlike the way books and CDs have long been sold as loss leaders at big chains to attract shoppers. The cultural field has become increasingly controlled by companies “whose sole contribution to the creative work,” to borrow Cory Doctorow’s biting expression, “is chaining children to factories in China and manufacturing skinny electronics” or developing the most sophisticated methods for selling our data to advertisers.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. One natural consequence of Web-based technologies was supposed to be the elimination of middlemen, or “disintermediation.” “The great virtue of the Internet is that it erodes power,” the influential technologist Esther Dyson said. “It sucks power out of the center, and takes it to the periphery, it erodes the power of institutions over people while giving to individuals the power to run their lives.”26 The problem, though, is that disintermediation has not lived up to its potential. Instead, it has facilitated the rise of a new generation of mediators that are sometimes difficult to see. As much as networked technology has dismantled and distributed power in more egalitarian ways, it has also extended and obscured power, making it less visible and, arguably, harder to resist.

The disruptive impact of the Web has been uneven at best. From one angle, power has been sucked to the periphery: new technologies have created space for geographically dispersed communities to coalesce, catalyzed new forms of activism and political engagement, and opened up previously unimaginable avenues for self-expression and exposure to art and ideas. That’s the story told again and again. But if we look from another angle and ask how, precisely, the power of institutions has been eroded, the picture becomes murkier.

Entrenched institutions have been strengthened in many ways. Thanks to digital technologies, Wall Street firms can trade derivatives at ever-faster rates, companies can inspect the private lives of prospective and current employees, insurance agencies have devised new methods to assess risky clients, political candidates can marshal big data to sway voters, and governments can survey the activities of citizens as never before. Corporate control—in media as in other spheres—is as secure as ever. In profound ways, power has been sucked in, not out.

In the realm of media and culture, the uncomfortable truth is that the information age has been accompanied by increasing consolidation and centralization, a process aided by the embrace of openness as a guiding ideal. While the old-media colossi may not appear to loom as large over our digital lives as they once did, they have hardly disappeared. Over the previous decade, legacy media companies have not fallen from the Fortune 500 firmament but have actually risen. In early 2013 they surprised analysts by reporting skyrocketing share prices: Disney and Time Warner were up 32 percent, CBS 40.2 percent, Comcast a shocking 57.6 percent.27

These traditional gatekeepers have been joined by new online gateways, means of accessing information that cannot be avoided. A handful of Internet and technology companies have become as enormous and influential as the old leviathans: they now make up thirteen of the thirty largest publicly traded corporations in the United States.28 The omnipresent Google, which, on an average day, accounts for approximately 25 percent of all North American consumer Internet traffic, has gobbled up over one hundred smaller firms, partly as a method of thwarting potential rivals, averaging about one acquisition a week since 2010; Facebook now has well over one billion users, or more than one in seven people on the planet; Amazon controls one-tenth of all American online commerce and its swiftly expanding cloud computing services host the data and traffic of hundreds of thousands of companies located in almost two hundred countries, an estimated one-third of all Internet users accessing Amazon’s cloud at least once a day; and Apple, which sits on almost $140 billion in cash reserves, jockeys with Exxon Mobil for the title of the most valuable company on earth, with a valuation exceeding the GDP (gross domestic product) of most nations.29

Instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open Internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players. Thus an independent musician like Rebecca Gates is squeezed from both sides. Off-line, local radio stations have been absorbed by Clear Channel and the major labels control more of the music market than they did before the Internet emerged. And online Gates has to position herself and her work on a monopolists’ platform or risk total invisibility.

Monopolies, contrary to early expectations, prosper online, where winner-take-all markets emerge partly as a consequence of Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network increases exponentially by the number of connections or users: the more people have telephones or have social media profiles or use a search engine, the more valuable those services become. (Counterintuitively, given his outspoken libertarian views, PayPal founder and first Facebook investor Peter Thiel has declared competition overrated and praised monopolies for improving margins.30) What’s more, many of the emerging info-monopolies now dabble in hardware, software, and content, building their businesses at every possible level, vertically integrating as in the analog era.

This is the contradiction at the center of the new information system: the more customized and user friendly our computers and mobile devices are, the more connected we are to an extensive and opaque circuit of machines that coordinate and keep tabs on our activities; everything is accessible and individualized, but only through companies that control the network from the bottom up.31 Amazon strives to control both the bookshelf and the book and everything in between. It makes devices, offers cloud computing services, and has begun to produce its own content, starting various publishing imprints before expanding to feature film production.32 Google is taking a similar approach, having expanded from search into content, operating system design, retail, gadget manufacturing, robotics, “smart” appliances, self-driving cars, debit cards, and fiber broadband.

More troublingly, at least for those who believed the Internet upstarts would inevitably vanquish the establishment dinosaurs, are the ways the new and old players have melded. Condé Nast bought Reddit, Fox has a stake in Vice Media, Time Warner bet on Maker Studios (which is behind some of YouTube’s biggest stars), Apple works intimately with Hollywood and AT&T, Facebook joined forces with Microsoft and the major-label-backed Spotify, and Twitter is trumpeting its utility to television programmers. Google, in addition to cozying up to the phone companies that use its Android operating system, has struck partnership deals with entertainment companies including Disney, Paramount, ABC, 20th Century Fox, and Sony Pictures while making numerous overtures to network and cable executives in hopes of negotiating a paid online television service.33

Google has licensing agreements with the big record companies for its music-streaming service and holds stake alongside Sony and Universal in Vevo, the music video site that is also the most viewed “channel” on YouTube.34 YouTube has attempted to partly remake itself in television’s image, investing a small fortune in professionally produced Web series, opening studios for creators in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and seeking “brand safe” and celebrity-driven content to attract more advertising revenue.35 “Top YouTube execs like to say they’re creating the next generation of cable TV, built and scaled for the web,” reports Ad Age. “But instead of 500-odd channels on TV, YouTube is making a play for the ‘next 10,000,’ appealing to all sorts of niches and interest groups.”36

Though audiences may be smaller as a consequence of this fragmentation, they will be more engaged and more thoroughly monitored and marketed to than traditional television viewers.37 As Lessig predicted, the “limitations of twentieth-century advertising” are indeed being overcome. As a consequence, the future being fashioned perpetuates and expands upon the defects of the earlier system instead of forging a new path.

Meanwhile, the captains of industry leading the charge toward mergers and acquisitions within the media sphere cynically invoke the Internet to justify their grand designs. Who can complain, they shrug, if one fellow owns a multibillion-dollar empire when anyone can start a Web site for next to nothing? The subject of antitrust investigations in Europe and the United States, Google executives respond to allegations that the company abuses its dominance in search to give its own services an advantage by insisting that on the Internet “competition is one click away.”

Such is Rupert Murdoch’s view of things as well. Not long before the phone-hacking scandal brought down his tabloid News of the World, Murdoch made a bid for BSkyB, a move that would have given him control of over half of the television market in the UK. He assured the British House of Lords that concerns about ownership and consolidation were “ten years out of date” given the abundance of news outlets for people to choose from online. The House of Lords, however, was not convinced, as a lengthy report to Parliament made clear: “We do not accept that the increase of news sources invalidates the case for special treatment of the media through ownership regulation. We believe that there is still a danger that if media ownership becomes too concentrated the diversity of voices available could be diminished.”38

In the United States, however, even the core attribute of the Internet’s openness, so disingenuously deployed by the likes of Murdoch, is under threat. The nation’s leading cable lobbying group has a phalanx of full-time staff campaigning against Net neutrality—the idea that government regulation should ensure that the Internet stay an open platform, one where service providers cannot slow down or block certain Web sites to stifle competition or charge others a fee to speed up their traffic.

Ironically, the effort is headed by ex-FCC (Federal Communications Commission) chairman Michael Powell, who, in 2003, began his abdication of his role as public servant by publishing an op-ed in which he argued against government intervention in the media marketplace. “The bottomless well of information called the Internet” makes ownership rules simply unnecessary, a throwback to “the bygone era of black-and-white television,” Powell wrote, positively invoking the very attributes of the Internet he is now paid handsomely to undermine. (In 2013 the revolving door came full circle when Tom Wheeler became Chairman of the FCC; Wheeler once stood at the helm of the same lobbying organization Powell now presides over.)39

Based on the principle of common carriage—rules first established under English common law and applied initially to things like canals, highways, and railroads and later to telegraph and telephone lines—advocates of Net neutrality seek to extend this tradition to our twenty-first-century communications system, prohibiting the owners of a network from abusing their power by discriminating against anyone’s data, whether by slowing or stopping it or charging more to speed it up. They hope to defend the openness of the Internet by securing federal regulation that would guarantee that all bits, no matter who is sending or receiving them, are treated equally. The images and text on your personal Web site, they maintain, should be delivered as swiftly as Amazon or CNN’s front page.

Telecom companies have something different in mind. AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, and others recognize that they could boost revenue significantly by charging for preferential service—adding a “fast lane” to the “information superhighway,” as critics have described their plan. Service providers, for example, could ban the services of rivals outright, decide to privilege content they own while throttling everything else, or start charging content providers to have their Web sites load faster, prioritizing those who pay the most—all three scenarios putting newcomers and independents at a substantial and potentially devastating disadvantage while favoring the already consolidated and well capitalized.

The Internet is best thought of as a series of layers: a physical layer, a code layer, and a content layer. The bottom “physical,” or ISP (Internet service provider) layer, is made up of the cables and routers through which our communications travel. In the middle is the “code” or “applications,” which consists of the protocols and software that make the lower layer run. On top of that is the “content,” the information we move across wires and airwaves and see on our screens. The telecommunications companies, which operate the physical layer, are fundamental to the entire enterprise. Common carriers—“mediating institutions” essential to social functioning—are sometimes called “public callings,” a term that underscores the responsibility that comes with such position and power.

In his insightful book The Master Switch, Tim Wu, originator of the term “Net neutrality,” explains why this may be the biggest media and communications policy battle ever waged. “While there were once distinct channels of telephony, television, radio, and film,” Wu writes, “all information forms are now destined to make their way increasingly along the master network that can support virtually any kind of data traffic.” Convergence has raised the stakes. “With every sort of political, social, cultural, and economic transaction having to one degree or another now gone digital, this proposes an awesome dependence on a single network, and no less vital need to preserve its openness from imperial designs,” Wu warns. “This time is different: with everything on one network, the potential power to control is so much greater.”

While we like to imagine the Internet as a radical, uncontrollable force—it’s often said the system was designed to survive a nuclear attack—it is in fact vulnerable to capture by the private interests we depend on for access. In 2010, rulings by the FCC based on a controversial proposal put forth by Verizon and Google established network neutrality on wired broadband but failed to extend the common carrier principle to wireless connections; in other words, network neutrality rules apply to the cable or DSL service you use at home but not to your cell phone. In 2013, Google showed further signs of weakening its resolve on the issue when it began to offer fiber broadband with advantageous terms of service that many observers found violate the spirit of Net neutrality.40

Given the steady shift to mobile computing, including smartphones, tablets, and the emerging Internet-of-things (the fact that more and more objects, from buildings to cars to clothing, will be networked in coming years), the FCC’s 2010 ruling was already alarmingly insufficient when it was made. Nevertheless, telecommunications companies went on offense, with Verizon successfully challenging the FCC’s authority to regulate Internet access in federal appeals court in early 2014. But even as the rules were struck down, the judges acknowledged concerns that broadband providers represent a real threat, describing the kind of discriminatory behavior they were declaring lawful: companies might restrict “end-user subscribers’ ability to access the New York Times website” in order to “spike traffic” to their own news sources or “degrade the quality of the connection to a search website like Bing if a competitor like Google paid for prioritized access.”41

Proponents of Net neutrality maintain that the FCC rules were in any case riddled with loopholes and the goal now is to ground open Internet rules and the FCC’s authority on firmer legal footing (namely by reclassifying broadband as a “telecommunications” and not an “information” service under Title II of the Communications Act, thereby automatically subjecting ISPS to common carrier obligations.) Opponents contend that Net neutrality would unduly burden telecom companies, which should have the right to dictate what travels through their pipes and charge accordingly, while paving the way for government control of the Internet. As a consequence of the high stakes, Net neutrality—a fight for the Internet as an open platform—has become a cause célèbre, and rightly so. However arcane the discussion may sometimes appear, the outcome of this battle will profoundly affect us all, and it is one worth fighting for.