Who Owns the Internet? What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture. By Elizabeth Kolbert
Last fall, some Times reporters
went looking for the source of a stream of largely fabricated pro-Trump stories
that had run on a Web site called Departed. They traced them to a
twenty-two-year-old computer-science student in Tbilisi named Beqa Latsabidze.
He told the Times that he had begun the election season by
pumping out flattering stories about Hillary Clinton, but the site hadn’t
generated much interest. When he switched to pro-Trump nonsense, traffic had
soared, and so had the site’s revenues. “For me, this is all about income,”
Latsabidze said. Perhaps the real problem is not that Brand’s prophecy failed
but that it came true. A “computer bum” sitting in Tbilisi is now so
“empowered” as an individual that he can help turn an election halfway around
the world.
On the night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, took to her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were dismayed. Hayes himself remained up until midnight; then he, too, retired, convinced that his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, would become the next President.
Hayes had indeed lost
the popular vote, by more than two hundred and fifty thousand ballots. And he
might have lost the Electoral College as well had it not been for the
machinations of journalists working in the shady corners of what’s been called
“the Victorian Internet.”Chief among the
plotters was an Ohioan named William Henry Smith. Smith ran the western arm of
the Associated Press, and in this way controlled the bulk of the copy that ran
in many small-town newspapers. The Western A.P. operated in tight
affiliation - some would say collusion - with Western Union, which exercised a
near-monopoly over the nation’s telegraph lines. Early in the campaign, Smith
decided that he would employ any means necessary to assure a victory for Hayes,
who, at the time, was serving a third term as Ohio’s governor. In the run-up to
the Republican National Convention, Smith orchestrated the release of damaging
information about the Governor’s rivals.
Then he had the Western A.P. blare
Hayes’s campaign statements and mute Tilden’s. At one point, an unflattering
piece about Hayes appeared in the Chicago Times, a Democratic
paper. (The piece claimed that Hayes, who had been a general in the Union Army,
had accepted money from a soldier to give to the man’s family, but had failed
to pass it on when the soldier died.) The A.P. flooded the wires with articles
discrediting the story. Once the votes had
been counted, attention shifted to South Carolina, Florida, and
Louisiana—states where the results were disputed. Both parties dispatched
emissaries to the three states to try to influence the Electoral College
outcome. Telegrams sent by Tilden’s representatives were passed on to Smith,
courtesy of Western Union. Smith, in turn, shared the contents of these
dispatches with the Hayes forces. This proto-hack of the Democrats’ private
communications gave the Republicans an obvious edge. Meanwhile, the A.P. sought
and distributed legal opinions supporting Hayes. (Outraged Tilden supporters
took to calling it the “Hayesociated Press.”) As Democrats watched what they
considered to be the theft of the election, they fell into a funk. “They are full of
passion and want to do something desperate but hardly know how to,” one
observer noted. Two days before Hayes was inaugurated, on March 5, 1877, the
Sun appeared with a black border on the front page.
“These are days of humiliation, shame and mourning for every patriotic
American,” the paper’s editor wrote.
History, Mark Twain is
supposed to have said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Once again,
the President of the United States is a Republican who lost the popular vote.
Once again, he was abetted by shadowy agents who manipulated the news. And once
again Democrats are in a finger-pointing funk. Journalists,
congressional committees, and a special counsel are probing the details of what
happened last fall. But two new books contend that the large lines of the
problem are already clear. As in the eighteen-seventies, we are in the midst of
a technological revolution that has altered the flow of information. Now, as
then, just a few companies have taken control, and this concentration of
power - which Americans have acquiesced to without ever really intending to,
simply by clicking away - is subverting our democracy.
Thirty years ago,
almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses
it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google
now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost
eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per
cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon
Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially
monopolistic. In his account, the new monopolies are even more powerful than
the old ones, which tended to be limited to a single product or service.
Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would have been envious of the reach of Mark
Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos...
