Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy Robert W.McChesney. New York: The New Press, 2013.

Abstract

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy Robert W. McChesney. New York: New Press, 2013.In this thought-provoking book, McChesney addresses the relationship between economic power and the digital world, focusing almost exclusively on the United States yet recognizing that virtually all the issues he raises are global and appear in varying degrees worldwide. Many of the most important policy fights over the Internet are international or transnational in character. Moreover, US Internet giants are at the commanding heights of both US and world capitalism, while the US government-supposedly working to regulate these digital corporations at home-generally acts as their powerful advocate abroad. author aims to go beyond most analyses of the Internet that fluctuate between celebratory and skeptical views of cyberspace and, with some exceptions, have one major flaw that severely diminishes the value of their work: they fail to ground their assessments of the Internet in political economy. This means they do not recognize the importance of the really existing capitalism in effectively deand reregulating, manipulating, and surreptitiously monitoring digital communication.In his earlier book Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999) McChesney presented a persuasive argument that the media, far from providing a foundation for freedom and democracy, had become a significant antidemocratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, worldwide. book addressed the corporate media explosion and the corresponding implosion of public life that characterized those years. He questioned the assumption that a society saturated by commercial information choices such as the United States is by definition a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect, he updates this analysis in light of recent advances of the digital age. He points out that today an oligopoly of a handful of giant firms dominates the political economy of the Internet. Google, for example, holds nearly seventy percent of the search-engine market and has an impressive ninety-seven percent share of the mobile search market, while Microsoft's operating system continues to be used on over ninety percent of the world's computers. And four companies control about ninety percent of the US wireless market, two of which-AT&T and Verizon-control sixty percent and have become a classic duopoly, in which the smart business policy is to imitate the other firm. author argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology, and the creation of walled gardens of proprietary control of information (fueling monopolistic pricing systems), as well as supporting and enabling government policies on a range of issues (involving reregulation and taxation strictly to serve the largest corporate interests and considerable subsidies to media corporations) have made the Internet a place of rampant commercialism.The profitability of the digital mega-firms is predicated on establishing proprietary systems for which they control access and the terms of the relationship rather than the idea of an Internet as open as possible. McChesney contends: The Internet has been subjected to the capital-accumulation process, which has a clear logic of its own, inimical to much of the democratic potential of digital communication. What seems to be an increasingly open public sphere, removed from the world of commodity exchange, seems to be morphing into a private sphere of increasingly closed, proprietary, even monopolistic markets. extent of this capitalist colonization of the Internet has not been as obtrusive as it might have been, because the vast reaches of cyberspace have continued to permit noncommercial utilization, although increasingly on the margins (97).The corporate media sector has done its utmost during much of the past fifteen years to limit the openness and egalitarianism of the Internet. …