One of the unique things about the Internet is that no one owns it. But that hasn’t stopped some corporations from trying to control it. Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which overhauled the nation’s communications regulations, most regional and long-distance phone companies and cable operators have competed against one another to provide connections to the Internet. However, there is more to controlling the Internet than being the service provider for it. Companies have realized the potential of dominating the Internet business through search engines, software, social networking, and providing access to content, all in order to sell the essential devices that display the content, or to amass users who become an audience for advertising.

Ownership and control of the Internet are connected to three Internet issues that command much public attention: the security of personal and private information, the appropriateness of online materials, and the accessibility and openness of the Internet. Important questions have been raised: Should personal or sensitive government information be private, or should the Internet be an enormous public record? Should the Internet be a completely open forum, or should certain types of communications be limited or prohibited? Should all people have equal access to the Internet, or should it be available only to those who can afford it? For each of these issues, there have been heated debates but no easy resolutions.

Ownership: Controlling the Internet

By the end of the 1990s, four companies— AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google—had emerged as the leading forces on the Internet, each with a different business angle. AOL attempted to dominate the Internet as the top ISP, connecting millions of home users to its proprietary Web system through dial-up access. Yahoo!’s method has been to make itself an all-purpose entry point—or portal—to the Internet. Computer software behemoth Microsoft’s approach began by integrating its Windows software with its Internet Explorer Web browser, drawing users to its MSN.com site and other Microsoft applications. Finally, Google made its play to seize the Internet with a more elegant, robust search engine to help users find Web sites.

Since the end of the 1990s, the Internet’s digital turn toward convergence has changed the Internet and the fortunes of its original leading companies. While AOL’s early success led to the huge AOL–Time Warner corporate merger of 2001, its technological shortcomings in broadband contributed to its devaluation and eventual spin-off from Time Warner in 2009. Yahoo! was eclipsed by Google in the search engine business but tried to regain momentum with its purchase of Tumblr in 2013.

In today’s converged world, in which mobile access to digital content prevails, Microsoft and Google still remain powerful. Those two, along with Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, constitute the leading companies of digital media’s rapidly changing world. Of the five, all but Facebook also operate proprietary cloud services and encourage their customers to store all their files in their “walled garden” for easy access across all devices. This ultimately builds brand loyalty and generates customer fees for file storage.23

Microsoft

Microsoft, the oldest of the dominant digital firms (established by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975), is an enormously wealthy software company that struggled for years to develop an Internet strategy. Although its software business is in a gradual decline, its flourishing digital game business (Xbox) helped it to continue to innovate and find a different path to a future in digital media. The company finally found moderate success on the Internet with its search engine Bing. With the 2012 release of the Windows Phone 8 mobile operating system and the Surface tablet, Microsoft was prepared to offer a formidable challenge in the mobile media business. In 2014, Microsoft brought its venerable office software to mobile devices, with Office for iPad and Office Mobile for iPhones and Android phones, all of which work with OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud service.

Google

Google, established in 1998, had instant success with its algorithmic search engine and now controls about 70 percent of the search market, generating billions of dollars of revenue yearly through the pay-per-click advertisements that accompany key-word searches. Google has also branched out into a number of other Internet offerings, including shopping (Google Shopping), mapping (Google Maps), e-mail (Gmail), blogging (Blogger), browsing (Chrome), books (Google Books), video (YouTube), and television (Chromecast). Google has also challenged Microsoft’s Office programs with Google Apps, a cloud-based bundle of word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, IM, and e-mail software. Google competes against Apple’s iTunes with Google Play, an online media store, and challenges Facebook with the social networking tool Google+.

As the Internet goes wireless, Google has acquired other companies in its quest to replicate its online success in the wireless world. Beginning in 2005, Google bought the Android operating system (now the leading mobile phone platform, and also a tablet computer platform) and mobile phone ad placement company AdMob. Google continues to experiment with new devices, such as Google Glass, which layers virtual information over one’s real view of the world through eyeglasses, and Android Wear, its new line of wearable technology (the first product is a smartwatch). Google’s biggest challenge is the “closed Web”: companies like Facebook and Apple that steer users to online experiences that are walled off from search engines and threaten Google’s reign as the Internet’s biggest advertising conglomerate.

Apple

Apple, Inc., was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 as a home computer company and is today the most valuable company in the world (by 2014, Google was the second most valuable company, ExxonMobil was third, and Microsoft was fourth).24 Apple was only moderately successful until 2001, when Jobs, having been forced out of the company for a decade, returned. Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes in 2003, two innovations that led the company to become the No. 1 music retailer in the United States. Then in 2007, Jobs introduced the iPhone, transforming the mobile phone industry. With Apple’s release of the intensely anticipated iPad in 2010, the company further redefined portable computing.

With the iPhone and iPad now at the core of Apple’s business, the company expanded to include providing content—music, television shows, movies, games, newspapers, magazines—to sell its media devices. The next wave of Apple’s innovations was the iCloud, a new storage and syncing service that enables users to access media content anywhere (with a wireless connection) on its mobile devices. The iCloud also helps ensure that customers purchase their media content through Apple’s iTunes store, further tethering users to its media systems. (For more on Apple devices and how they are made, see “Global Village: Designed in California, Assembled in China” on page 61.)

Amazon

Amazon started its business in 1995 in Seattle, selling the world’s oldest mass medium (books) online. Since that time, Amazon has developed into the world’s largest e-commerce store, selling not only books but also electronics, garden tools, clothing, appliances, and toys. To keep its lead in e-commerce, Amazon also acquired Zappos, the popular online shoe seller. Yet by 2007, with the introduction of its Kindle e-reader, Amazon was following Apple’s model of using content to sell devices. The Kindle became the first widely successful e-reader, and by 2010, e-books were outselling hardcovers and paperbacks at Amazon. In 2011, in response to Apple’s iPad, Amazon released its own color touchscreen tablet, the Kindle Fire, giving Amazon a device that can play all the media—including music, TV, movies, and games—it sells online and in its Appstore. Like Apple, Amazon has a Cloud Player for making media content portable and offers an additional 5 gigabytes of free Cloud Drive space to all users, to use however they like. Amazon is now also competing with television, cable networks, and Netflix by producing at least ten Amazon Originals television series for its streaming service.

Facebook

Facebook’s immense, socially dynamic audience (about two-thirds of the U.S. population and over 1.28 billion total users across the globe) is its biggest resource, and Facebook, like Google, has become a data processor as much as a social media service, collecting every tidbit of information about its users—what we “like,” where we live, what we read, and what we want—and selling this information to advertisers. Because Facebook users reveal so much about themselves in their profiles and the messages they share with others, Facebook can offer advertisers exceptionally tailored ads: A user who recently got engaged gets ads like “Impress Your Valentine,” “Vacation in Hawaii,” and “Are You Pregnant?” while a teenage girl sees ads for prom dresses, sweet-sixteen party venues, and “Chat with Other Teens” Web sites.

As a young company, Facebook has suffered growing pains while trying to balance its corporate interests (capitalizing on its millions of users) with its users’ interest in controlling the privacy of their own information. In 2012, Facebook had the third-largest public offering in U.S. history, behind General Motors and Visa, with the company valued at $104 billion. Facebook’s valuation is a reflection of investors’ hopes of what the company can do with more than one billion users rather than evidence of the company’s financial success so far. In recent years, Facebook has focused on moving its main interface from the computer screen to mobile phones. Its purchase of Instagram, the photo-sharing app, in 2012 for $1 billion was part of that strategy. Facebook’s approach appears to be successful: “Americans spend about one-fifth of their time on mobile phones checking Facebook,” the New York Times reported.25 Facebook continues to make investments to expand beyond its core service, with purchases in 2014 of WhatsApp, an instant messaging service, and Oculus VR, a virtual reality technology company.

Targeted Advertising and Data Mining

In the early years of the Web, advertising took the form of traditional display ads placed on pages. The display ads were no more effective than newspaper or magazine advertisements, and because they reached small, general audiences, they weren’t very profitable. But in the late 1990s, Web advertising began to shift to search engines. Paid links appeared as “sponsored links” at the top, bottom, and side of a search engine result list and even, depending on the search engine, within the “objective” result list itself. Every time a user clicks on a sponsored link, the advertiser pays the search engine for the click-through. For online shopping, having paid placement in searches can be a good thing. But search engines doubling as ad brokers may undermine the utility of search engines as neutral locators of Web sites (see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Tracking and Recording Your Every Move” on page 63).

Advertising has since spread to other parts of the Internet, including social networking sites, e-mail, and mobile apps. For advertisers—who for years struggled with how to measure people’s attention to ads—these activities make advertising easy to track, effective in reaching the desired niche audience, and relatively inexpensive, because ads get wasted less often on the uninterested. For example, Yahoo! gleans information from search terms; Google scans the contents of Gmail messages; and Facebook uses profile information, status updates, and “likes” to deliver individualized, real-time ads to users’ screens. Similarly, a mobile social networking application for smartphones, Foursquare, encourages users to earn points and “badges” by checking in at business locations, such as museums, restaurants, and airports (or other user-added locations), and to share that information via Twitter, Facebook, and text message. Other companies, like Poynt and Yelp, are also part of the location-based ad market. The rise in smartphone use has contributed to extraordinary growth in mobile advertising, which jumped from $3.4 billion in 2012 to $7.1 billion in 2013, accounting for 17 percent of the $42.8 billion in total Internet advertising that year.26

Gathering users’ location and purchasing habits has been a boon for advertising, but these data-collecting systems also function as consumer surveillance and data mining operations. The practice of data mining also raises issues of Internet security and privacy. Millions of people, despite knowing that transmitting personal information online can make them vulnerable to online fraud, have embraced the ease of e-commerce: the buying and selling of products and services on the Internet, which took off in 1995 with the launch of Amazon. What many people don’t know is that their personal information may be used without their knowledge for commercial purposes, such as targeted advertising. For example, in 2011, the Federal Trade Commission charged Facebook with a list of eight violations in which Facebook told consumers their information would be private but made it public to advertisers and third-party applications. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the company had made “a bunch of mistakes” and settled with the FTC by fixing the problems and agreeing to submit to privacy audits for twenty years.27

One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of computer users is cookies, or information profiles that are automatically collected and transferred between computer servers whenever users access Web sites.28 The legitimate purpose of a cookie is to verify that a user has been cleared for access to a particular Web site, such as a library database that is open only to university faculty and students. However, cookies can also be used to create marketing profiles of Web users to target them for advertising. Many Web sites require the user to accept cookies in order to gain access to the site.

Even more unethical and intrusive is spyware, information-gathering software that is often secretly bundled with free downloaded software. Spyware can be used to send pop-up ads to users’ computer screens, to enable unauthorized parties to collect personal or account information of users, or even to plant a malicious click-fraud program on a computer, which generates phony clicks on Web ads that force an advertiser to pay for each click.

In 1998, the FTC developed fair information practice principles for online privacy to address the unauthorized collection of personal data. These principles require Web sites to (1) disclose their data-collection practices, (2) give consumers the option to choose whether their data may be collected and to provide information on how that data is collected, (3) permit individuals access to their records to ensure data accuracy, and (4) secure personal data from unauthorized use. Unfortunately, the FTC has no power to enforce these principles, and most Web sites either do not self-enforce them or deceptively appear to enforce them when they in fact don’t.29 As a result, consumer and privacy advocates are calling for stronger regulations, such as requiring Web sites to adopt opt-in or opt-out policies. Opt-in policies, favored by consumer and privacy advocates, require Web sites to obtain explicit permission from consumers before the sites can collect browsing history data. Opt-out policies, favored by data-mining corporations, allow for the automatic collection of browsing history data unless the consumer requests to “opt out” of the practice. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission approved a report recommending that Congress adopt “Do Not Track” legislation to limit tracking of user information on Web sites and mobile devices and enable users to easily opt out of data collection. Several Web browsers now offer “Do Not Track” options, while other Web tools, like Ghostery, detect Web tags, bugs, and other trackers, generating a list of all the sites following your moves.

Security: The Challenge to Keep Personal Information Private

When you watch television, listen to the radio, read a book, or go to the movies, you do not need to provide personal information to others. However, when you use the Internet, whether you are signing up for an e-mail account, shopping online, or even just surfing the Web, you give away personal information—voluntarily or not. As a result, government surveillance, online fraud, and unethical data-gathering methods have become common, making the Internet a potentially treacherous place.

Government Surveillance

Since the inception of the Internet, government agencies worldwide have obtained communication logs, Web browser histories, and the online records of individual users who thought their online activities were private. In the United States, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act (which became law about a month after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and was renewed in 2006) grants sweeping powers to law-enforcement agencies to intercept individuals’ online communications, including e-mail messages and browsing records. The act was intended to allow the government to more easily uncover and track potential terrorists and terrorist organizations, but many now argue that it is too vaguely worded, allowing the government to unconstitutionally probe the personal records of citizens without probable cause and for reasons other than preventing terrorism. Moreover, searches of the Internet permit law-enforcement agencies to gather huge amounts of data, including the communications of people who are not the targets of an investigation. Documents leaked to the news media in 2013 by former CIA employee and former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA has continued its domestic spying program, collecting bulk Internet and mobile phone data on millions of Americans for more than a decade.

Online Fraud

In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for online robbery and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information in order to fraudulently spend other people’s money. Computer hackers have the ability to infiltrate Internet databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal information and to steal credit card numbers from online retailers. Identity theft victimizes hundreds of thousands of people a year, and clearing one’s name can take a very long time and cost a lot of money. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, about 7 percent of Americans were victims of identity theft in 2012, totaling about $24.7 billion in losses.30 One particularly costly form of Internet identity theft is known as phishing. This scam involves phony e-mail messages that appear to be from official Web sites—such as eBay, PayPal, or the user’s university or bank—asking customers to update their credit card numbers, account passwords, and other personal information.

Appropriateness: What Should Be Online?

The question of what constitutes appropriate content has been part of the story of most mass media, from debates over the morality of lurid pulp-fiction books in the nineteenth century to arguments over the appropriateness of racist, sexist, and homophobic content in films and music. Although it is not the only material to come under intense scrutiny, most of the debate about appropriate media content, despite the medium, has centered on sexually explicit imagery.

As has always been the case, eliminating some forms of sexual content from books, films, television, and other media remains a top priority for many politicians and public interest groups. So it should not be surprising that public objection to indecent and obscene Internet content has led to various legislative efforts to tame the Web. Although the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Child Online Protection Act of 1998 were both judged unconstitutional, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 was passed and upheld in 2003. This act requires schools and libraries that receive federal funding for Internet access to use software that filters out any visual content deemed obscene, pornographic, or harmful to minors, unless disabled at the request of adult users. Regardless of new laws, pornography continues to flourish on commercial sites, individuals’ blogs, and social networking pages. As the American Library Association notes, there is “no filtering technology that will block out all illegal content, but allow access to constitutionally protected materials.”31

Although the “back alleys of sex” on the Internet have caused considerable public concern, Internet sites that carry potentially dangerous information (bomb-building instructions, hate speech) have also incited calls for Internet censorship, particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and several tragic school shootings. Nevertheless, many people—fearing that government regulation of speech would inhibit freedom of expression in a democratic society—want the Web to be completely unregulated.

Access: The Fight to Prevent a Digital Divide

A key economic issue related to the Internet is whether the cost of purchasing a personal computer and paying for Internet services will undermine equal access. Coined to echo the term economic divide (the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor), the term digital divide refers to the growing contrast between the “information haves,” those who can afford to purchase computers and pay for Internet services, and the “information have-nots,” those who may not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.

Although about 87 percent of U.S. households are connected to the Internet, there are big gaps in access. For example, a 2014 study found that only 57 percent of Americans age sixty-five and up go online, compared with 88 percent of Americans ages fifty to sixty-four, 93 percent of Americans ages thirty to forty-nine, and 98 percent of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine. Education has an even more pronounced effect: Only 76 percent of people with a high school education or less have Internet access, compared with 91 percent of people with some college and 97 percent of college graduates.32

The rising use of smartphones is helping to narrow the digital divide, particularly along racial lines. In the United States, African American and Hispanic families have generally lagged behind whites in home access to the Internet, which requires a computer and broadband access. However, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that African Americans and Hispanics are active users of mobile Internet devices. The report concluded, “While blacks and Latinos are less likely to have access to home broadband than whites, their use of smartphones nearly eliminates that difference.”33

Globally, though, the have-nots face an even greater obstacle to crossing the digital divide. Although the Web claims to be worldwide, the most economically powerful countries—the United States, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom—account for most of its international flavor. In nations such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Myanmar (Burma), the governments permit limited or no access to the Web. In other countries, an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure hampers access to the Internet. And in underdeveloped countries, phone lines and computers are almost nonexistent. For example, in Sierra Leone—a West African nation of about six million people, with poor public utilities and intermittent electrical service—less than a hundred thousand people, or about 1.7 percent of the population, are Internet users.34 However, as mobile phones become more popular in the developing world, they can provide one remedy for the global digital divide.

Even as the Internet matures and becomes more accessible, wealthy users are still more able to buy higher levels of privacy and faster speeds of Internet access than are other users. Whereas traditional media made the same information available to everyone who owned a radio or a TV set, the Internet creates economic tiers and classes of service. Policy groups, media critics, and concerned citizens continue to debate the implications of the digital divide, valuing the equal opportunity to acquire knowledge.

Net Neutrality: Maintaining an Open Internet

For more than a decade, the debate over net neutrality has framed the shape of the Internet’s future. Net neutrality refers to the principle that every Web site and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access. The idea of an open and neutral network has existed since the origins of the Internet, but there had never been a formal policy until 2010, when the Federal Communications Commission approved a limited set of net neutrality rules. Still, the debate forges on.

The dispute over net neutrality and the future of the Internet is dominated by some of the biggest communications corporations. These major telephone and cable companies—including Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Cox—control 98 percent of broadband access in the United States through DSL and cable modem service. They want to offer faster connections and priority to clients willing to pay higher rates, and provide preferential service for their own content or for content providers who make special deals with them—effectively eliminating net neutrality. For example, tiered Internet access might mean that these companies would charge customers more for data-heavy services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, or iTunes. These companies argue that the profits they could make with tiered Internet access would allow them to build expensive new networks, benefiting everyone. In 2014, Netflix (which accounts for 30 percent of Internet traffic) decided to go this route and revealed that it paid Comcast (the nation’s biggest cable company and cable modem provider) for a faster connection to its service to ensure better video streaming for its customers. Netflix’s willingness to pay more to Comcast undercut content providers’ collective backing of net neutrality.35

Supporters of net neutrality—mostly bloggers, video gamers, educators, religious groups, unions, and small businesses—argue that the cable and telephone giants actually have incentive to rig their services and cause net congestion in order to force customers to pay a premium for higher-speed connections. They claim that an Internet without net neutrality would hurt small businesses, nonprofits, and Internet innovators, who might be stuck in the “slow lane” and not be able to afford the fastest connections that large corporations can afford. Large Internet corporations like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Skype, and Facebook also support net neutrality because their businesses depend on their millions of customers having equal access to the Web.

In late 2010, the FCC adopted rules on net neutrality, noting that “the Internet’s openness promotes innovation, investment, competition, free expression, and other national broadband goals.”36 But the FCC’s rules were twice rejected by federal courts, most recently in 2014. Afterward, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler proposed that the FCC’s new policy on the Internet would allow cable and telephone companies to charge tiered fees for slow and fast service. The New York Times argued that if the policy is approved, it would create “a two-speed Internet.”37 The proposal pleased the telecommunication companies, but critics noted that while big companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google could pay up, smaller start-ups (which Netflix, Amazon, and Google once were) would never be able to pay for the Internet’s “fast lane,” thus undermining the Internet’s spirit of equality and discouraging digital entrepreneurs.

Alternative Voices

Independent programmers continue to invent new ways to use the Internet and communicate over it. While some of their innovations have remained free of corporate control, others have been taken over by commercial interests. Despite commercial buyouts, however, the pioneering spirit of the Internet’s independent early days endures; the Internet continues to be a participatory medium in which anyone can be involved. Two of the most prominent areas in which alternative voices continue to flourish relate to open-source software and digital archiving.

Open-Source Software

In the early days of computer code writing, amateur programmers were developing open-source software on the principle that it was a collective effort. Programmers openly shared program source codes and their ideas to upgrade and improve programs. Beginning in the 1970s, Microsoft put an end to much of this activity by transforming software development into a business in which programs were developed privately and users were required to pay for both the software and its periodic upgrades.

However, programmers are still developing noncommercial, open-source software, if on a more limited scale. One open-source operating system, Linux, was established in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Since the establishment of Linux, professional computer programmers and hobbyists around the world have participated in improving it, creating a sophisticated software system that even Microsoft has acknowledged is a credible alternative to expensive commercial programs. Linux can operate across disparate platforms, and companies such as IBM, Dell, and Oracle, as well as other corporations and governmental organizations, have developed applications and systems that run on it. Still, the greatest impact of Linux is evident not on the desktop screens of everyday computer users but in the operation of behind-the-scenes computer servers.

Digital Archiving

Librarians have worked tirelessly to build nonprofit digital archives that exist outside of any commercial system in order to preserve libraries’ tradition of open access to information. One of the biggest and most impressive digital preservation initiatives is the Internet Archive, established in 1996. The Internet Archive aims to ensure that researchers, historians, scholars, and all citizens have universal access to human knowledge—that is, everything that’s digital: text, moving images, audio, software, and more than 150 billion archived Web pages reaching back to the earliest days of the Internet. The archive is growing at staggering rates as the general public and partners such as the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress upload cultural artifacts. For example, the Internet Archive stores more than 134,000 live music concerts, including performances by Jack Johnson, the Grateful Dead, and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Media activist David Bollier has likened open-access initiatives to an information “commons,” underscoring the idea that the public collectively owns (or should own) certain public resources, like airwaves, the Internet, and public spaces (such as parks). “Libraries are one of the few, if not the key, public institutions defending popular access and sharing of information as a right of all citizens, not just those who can afford access,” Bollier says.38