Internet Companies Concentrating Power

[SOURCE: Miami Herald, AUTHOR: Edward Wasserman edward_wasserman@hotmail.com]
[Commentary] Media owners are back to buying up and bulking up. Traditional media aren't shrinking after all. But never mind that. Connoisseurs of monopoly need to shift their attention to the Internet, where we're on the brink of a concentration of media control that a few years ago would have been unimaginable. Consider this: Roughly one-fifth of the human race, the 1.3 billion people of China, have been denied access to huge areas of critically important information about their own country -- such as the annihilation of the 1989 democracy movement -- thanks to the self-serving complicity of just three U.S. companies: Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. Now that's concentrated power. No, the problem of media concentration isn't over. It hasn't even begun. Technological advances have moved us way beyond quaint issues of how many obsolescent TV stations one company should own. The same Internet that promises empowerment and unprecedented informational abundance has made possible a depth of control that the most visionary tyrant of the past would not have dared aspire to.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/13804851.htm