Archive for 2018

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[ecrea] New book on The Internet Oligopoly of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon & Microsoft

Thu Sep 06 11:18:28 GMT 2018


New book “Internet Oligopoly: The Corporate Takeover of Our Digital World” (Emerald Publishing)

It recounts how a handful of US-based companies established a powerful oligopoly over the internet in a little more than a decade. Drawing on a historical and political economy analysis, the book provides insight on how, under neoliberal hegemony, the internet was transformed from an emancipatory project for humanity to the final frontier of unrestrained capitalism.

You can order the book on Emerald’s website :

https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Internet-Oligopoly/?K=9781787692008

You can also download the Introduction for free on this link:

https://books.emeraldinsight.com/resources/pdfs/chapters/9781787692008-TYPE23-NR2.pdf

Here’s a short description of the book:

“The unique contribution of this book is in offering an analytical framework of the contemporary internet as a whole, studied through the lens of history and political economy. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are not examined here as exceptional successes, but rather as emblematic products of a new capitalist order that they have also helped forge, legitimize and strengthen. This neoliberal order is resolutely opposed to the original project of the internet. The book retraces in some detail the process of commodification that resulted in financial rationales taking over the field of networked computing, which was originally conceived of as a public good in the service of collective and individual emancipation. The book then uncovers how, today, this internet oligopoly uses its exorbitant market power to eliminate any potential competition; how it takes advantage of global financialization to exploit human labour on a global scale and to avoid taxation; and how it implements strategies to control our communication methods for accessing information and content online, thus increasingly controlling the digital public sphere. The book dives deeply into the historical process and the economic and political forces that paved the way for the establishment of this Internet Oligopoly. In so doing, it reveals how the business models of these private companies, and their revolutionizing advertising, have reshaped our modern societies. Ultimately, it shows that the future of the internet cannot be thought of outside broader issues such as the place of work in future societies, social and economic inequalities, and, ultimately, democracy”.

For further information please contact the author at:    (smyrnaios /at/ protonmail.com)



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