Is the internet still as free a space as it was when it first came to our homes? Or is the growing dominance of a few companies like Google and Facebook threatening the open character of the web? And if the web does become less chaotic, more controlled, will that necessarily be a bad thing?

That’s the subject in the talk below, where The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin meets up with Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.”

The interview is mainly about “how forms of communication, from the telephone to the Internet, are eventually controlled by monopolies”.

Big fish

It’s easy to think Wu is making much of a hassle about nothing. The internet is working perfectly fine, I like Google.  But consider what Wu pointed out in another talk of his at the New America Foundation. For every major market on the internet, there is now one, or just a few, dominant players. If you take the first letters of every one of them, it’ll spell FAST AGE. They are: Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, Google and Ebay.

These are the big fish right now. If  Wu is right, they’ll want to continue to grow bigger, and eventually try to eat each other.

“There’s this golden phase for these ‘defining moguls’, these monopolists, right at the beginning, where they enjoy the benefits of centralization and they use their enormous power for the public good. The problem is once they get there, they don’t want to leave.”

“They’re exactly like benevolent dictators. They’re usually great in the beginning, but then they don’t want to leave.”

If Wu is right, that would obviously be a bad thing for us. But will Google, Facebook, and Apple really turn into these sort of controlling monopolies? Or are they already?

Or, last option: is the internet different from all other media Wu has studied for his book?

Odd medium

Surely, any straight-forward answer to these questions will be wrong, since the internet is such an odd and complex medium. It’s mainstream and alternative. It’s super-commercialized, and it’s anti-capitalist. There’s no centre to it, yet there’s a few companies right on top of every big market. People are in control of what they consume, and Google is through search results, too. It’s good for democratic debate on some sites, terrible on others. It’s bottum-up, top-down. Everyone’s a producer if (s)he wants to be, yet very little people ever get to read or see any of the stuff “everyone is creating”.

The internet is weird really, because many of these contradictory statements are true. The web just sucks it all up and spits back up whatever you’re good at getting out of it. (That is, incidentally, why media education for kids is so important.)

We have to be sensitive to the many paradoxes of the internet, if we’re going to speak sensibly about it. In any case, Wu is pretty sure of one thing. “If history repeats itself, we should see one or two companies trying to take over everything.”

We’ll see.

Watch the talk below. For those interested: Wu also gives his view about the much disputed Google/Verizon deal (skip to 12:00).

By the way, Wu is sure to disagree with Andrew Keen, who, in a talk I posted some time ago, argues that the internet itself reflects values, and therefore is in itself ideological. Watch Andrew Keens take on the web here. Perfect example of the paradoxical nature of the internet, and the radically different things people are saying about it.