Media Marriage Kicks off 'Internet Century' - for Some

The world's biggest corporate merger has put the Internet at the heart of the world's media industry. The huge deal heralds a new era of communication but may disappoint those who hope the Internet will give power to ordinary people.

The massive merger between America Online (AOL), the leading Internet company, and Time-Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate, will transform the Internet. But a question mark remains over whose interest the merger serves - a question with serious implications for developing countries.

The deal, valued at $350 billion, marks the coming of age of the Internet as the next stage of communication, bringing together television, film, radio, publishing and computing into one medium. It is already being described as heralding the dawn of "the Internet century."

In this marriage of the old and the new media, AOL will provide its Internet subscriber service via Time Warner's huge cable network, while Time Warner will use AOL's customer base to gain new consumers for its various media products. By sharing their resources, the two companies can dominate the cyberworld and encroach on the market share of rivals in media, entertainment and the Internet provision business.

The fear is, however, that the merger will reduce choice.

United States media historian Robert McChesney is among those who challenge the idea that the so-called 'information society' is giving consumers any degree of choice in the first place.

In his new book, Rich Media, Poor Democracy - Communication Politics in Dubious Times, McChesney says that the major beneficiaries of the Internet age will be the investors, advertisers and a handful of mainly US-based media, computer and telecommunications corporations. Such a concentration of power among unelected corporations could undermine democracy.

Mega mergers are seen as further consolidating this trend.

Concerns about the increased power of the media conglomerates is widespread. Describing the newly-announced deal as "Online Leviathan," an editorial in The Times of India predicted that a few big companies will shape the information and entertainment choices of millions of people all over the globe.

Now some fear that the gateways to the Web, opening up the information highway for all to use, will instead be controlled by the big players. As the smaller Internet service providers (ISPs) are swallowed up, this new medium, which has been used by a myriad of alternative media and political groups and non-governmental organisations, is in danger of being corporatised.

AOL is already the largest Internet service provider in the US. It owns the well-known ISP, CompuServe, as well as Netscape, the most widely used browser among 'Netizens' worldwide.

Its informal style helped to make AOL famous. It promoted on-line 'chat rooms' and gave the world the message "You've got mail!", later the title of a successful Hollywood film about love in virtual space. Not surprisingly, the Warner Bros film was extensively promoted by AOL to its 20 million subscribers.

Time Warner's extensive fibre-optic cable networks in the US mean that AOL can offer a service 100 times faster than traditional phone lines, cutting the time needed to download movies, music and 3-D graphics.

AOL-Time Warner can draw from the huge library of more than 5,700 Warner Bros feature films, or thousands of record labels produced by Warner Music, one of the world's biggest music companies. For children it offers Cartoon Network and for sports fans the leading magazine Sports Illustrated.

In news and current affairs, the group boasts such global brands as Cable News Network (CNN), the international 24-hour news channel, Time magazine, the world's oldest and one of the most influential newsweeklies, and Fortune, the magazine for the global corporate elite.

A further question mark hangs over exactly who will have access to the new technology.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, there were 120 million Internet users in 1998. Industry analysts expect this figure to grow manifold in the coming years. It is no wonder then that the major media and communication companies are scrambling to get on-line.

There is little doubt that the Internet has emerged as the fastest growing tool of modern global communication.

At the same time, the US alone has more computers than the rest of the world put together. With less than five percent of the planet's population, it accounts for more than 26 percent of global Internet use. In contrast, South Asia, home to nearly a quarter of humanity, has less than one percent of the world's Internet users, according to the UNDP.

Overall, less than three percent of the world's population - generally male, middle-class and fluent in English - is part of this cyberculture. English is used in almost 80 percent of websites, although fewer than one in 10 people worldwide speak the language.

The deal has also sparked off speculation about similar moves by other Internet and media companies.

Already, global players such as Microsoft, the world's biggest corporation in terms of market value, has taken stakes in telecom operators and is allied with AT&T, America's biggest telecommunication corporation. Speculation is rife whether Yahoo! will buy Disney or CBS Viacom.

According to some commentators, the Internet is still in its Stone Age and the scope for colonising cyberspace is virtually limitless. AOL chairman Steve Case admitted as much: "We're still scratching the surface" of the Internet's potential, he told journalists after the deal.

- GEMINI NEWS

The author, a former associate editor of Gemini News Service, is senior lecturer in mass communications at the University of North London in Britain.