Clifford Lynch, Director of the US Coalition for Networked Information, recently reflected that we are “now in an era when giant, badly behaved Telecom incumbents dominate”. This comment resonates with those of Timothy Wu in his 2010 book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, in which Wu emphasised the dominance of Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft (Wu, 2010). Wu argued that the internet is in danger of following the same path of company dominance as occurred with telegraphy and telephony in the nineteenth century, and film, radio and television in the twentieth.
A similar argument is propounded in Susan Crawford's Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, in which she argues that consumers in the USA are now held captive by large, unregulated telecommunication (telco) companies. Crawford believes that the USA has a telco system with “all the monopolistic characteristics of the old Bell system but none of the oversight or universality”.
To illustrate her argument that an increased government regulatory overview is required, Crawford documents, as a major case history, the rise of Comcast, which began with cable systems in rural Mississippi and is now the largest US cable operator. Comcast rapidly gained subscribers as telephone companies, such as Verizon and AT&T, lost copper phone line customers who wanted greater access to high-speed bandwidth.
Comcast merged with NBC Universal in 2011, a merger that Crawford covers in detail. In February 2013 Comcast bought the remaining 49 per cent of NBC Universal to make it America's largest media company, $US10bn bigger than Disney. While Crawford acknowledges that “Comcast is a great American success story”, she also argues that “its interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the country as a whole. Their interest is in keeping the profit margins as high as possible”.
Crawford believes high-speed internet access is essential for “innovation, economic growth, social communication, and the country's competitiveness”. As of May 2012, Comcast was the largest high-speed internet access provider in America, with nearly 19 million subscribers. Crawford directly addresses the question, “How much would it cost to bring fiber to the homes of all Americans?”. However, several commentators have subsequently challenged her predictions of costs.
Captive Audience provides a detailed, and unashamedly passionate, perspective on US internet access provision. No one would dispute Crawford's final words: “when it comes to bringing high-speed Internet access to all Americans, the country cannot afford to fail”.
