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

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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