TWX + AOL; NBC next?

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 03:23 PM 1/10/00 -0500, Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood
>> AOL, which has over 20 million Internet-access subscribers, has been
>> sparring recently with Time Warner over the issue of cable-TV
>> companies allowing access to their high-speed lines into consumers'
>> homes to Internet service providers.
>
>And how do we resolve such sparring in our "market economy"-- of course,
we end
>competition through merger.
>
>First AOL was allowed to merge with Nescape, now this.
>
>Hell, I am ready to call for the Justice Department to call off its antitrust
>action against Microsoft.  Gates may end up being the only counterweight
to the
>MCI-Sprint-Worldcom and AT&T-TCI and AOL-Time/Warner megaliths being
allowed to
>dominate the media-Internet landscape.
>
>Instead of an ideal of separation of content control from infrastructure
control
>to assure non-biased access to information for consumers, the fight over
>high-bandwidth access to the home is going to end up being a bloody
censorship
>war over who controls access to the home as these megaliths fight it out.
>
>Joel Klein at the antitrust desk is pathetic if he does not block this,
which he
>probably won't.
>

Nathan, your argument against mergers is valid only if the market-schmarket
fantasy how economy operates is true, and we all on this list know (I
presume) that such a view is a bunch of crap.  Some of us (me included)
believe that market-schmarket has often very bad influences, bringing
things down to the lowest common denominator (e.g. wages, or quality of
cultural products).

OTOH, centralization is not necessarily a bad thing (cf. central planning)
- lack of competition can save a great deal on transaction costs (thus
getting rid of a bunch the lawyers of the worst kind - the corporate
variety - as you previously argued), and can form a platform for a planned
economy that will never be possible under market competition.


>From a marxist, dialectical point of view, these mergers can thus be viewed
as the "satanic mills" of the 19th century - they are the product of the
capitalist drive for profit, but they also contain a seed of their own
destruction.   It would be much easier to mobilize a broad movement to
nationalize a few large industrrial conglomerates than to do likewise with
a bunch of smaller businesses, most of which are mom-and-pop shops.  

More generally, centralization is much more conducive to a revolution than
decentralization (cf. Barrington Moore, _Social origins of dictatorship and
democracy; lord and peasant in the making of the modern world_, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1966).

wojtek