[ecrea] New book on the Internet Oligopoly (in French)

New book on the Internet Oligopoly out (published by INA éditions).

The title in French is:

/Les GAFAM contre l'internet : Une économie politique du numérique/

You can read a long excerpt here:

http://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/l-internet-libre-et-gratuit-c-est-bien-fini-9725

Here’s a resumé in English:

"Digital technologies multiply in our everyday lives. Ordinary 
sociability, work, entertainment, education: almost all of our social 
life is gradually colonized by digital devices, networks, and services 
which become useful but also invasive adjuvants. This process takes 
place in a globalized and deregulated economy that favours an extreme 
concentration of resources. In this context, a few start-ups, once 
sympathetic, gave birth to oligopolistic multinationals that govern the 
informational infrastructure of our societies.

The objective of this book is to contribute to the constitution of an 
analytical framework of the Internet under the lens of political 
economy. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) are not 
examined as exceptional successes.On the contrary, they are seen as 
emblematic products of a new capitalist order which they themselves 
contribute to forge, legitimize and strengthen. This neoliberal order is 
resolutely opposed to the original project of the Internet. The book 
describes precisely the process of commodification that allowed 
financial logic to penetrate the field of connected computing, 
originally conceived as a public good in the service of collective 
emancipation. It shows how, today, the oligopoly of the Internet uses 
it’s exorbitant market power to eliminate any potential or real 
competition. How it profits from financial globalization to exploit 
human labour on a global scale and to avoid taxation. How it implements 
strategies that enable it to control our daily communication tools and 
platforms that we use to access information and content online. The book 
takes a long look at the sophisticated devices used by the oligopoly to 
capture the value produced on-line by a multitude of users and 
non-market structures, including through a massive exploitation of data 
collected on Internet users. Ultimately, it shows that the future of the 
Internet cannot be thought of outside broader issues such as the place 
of work in the future society, social and economic inequalities and, 
ultimately, democracy".


Nikos Smyrnaios
Maître de conférences / Associate professor
Laboratoire d'Études et de Recherches Appliquées en Sciences Sociales
Université de Toulouse
http://univ-toulouse.academia.edu/smyrnaios
http://ephemeron.eu



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