Pirates With a Periscope: Big Tech & The FUTURE OF THE FREE PRESS

“Journalism is dead in America…”
---Sean Hannity 2009
 
 
Journalism may not be completely dead yet. However, the industry in aggregate seems to be dying. Newspapers are in steep decline; and the cornerstones of the craft (magazines & periodicals) are locked in a death spiral. Similarly, local television news programs have experienced dramatic declines in viewership for more than a decade; and revenues for radio stations with all-news formats have flatlined.

The explosion of social media in recent years has undoubtedly disrupted the news and publishing industries.  These days, online news sources are a staple for a vast majority of adults in the United States. In fact, 43% of U.S. adults turned to social media, news websites and news apps for political news this past election cycle. In parallel, online media subscriptions grew at an astonishing 300% rate last year.

So why are so many industry bellwethers floundering in an era where content is supposedly “King”? The sad truth is that publishers in aggregate have largely abandoned their tradecraft. Most bought in to the assertion that “the broad opportunities…involve supplying information or entertainment“ while largely neglecting the other two pillars of their art: educating & enlightening their audiences. Additionally, many unwittingly bought into the assertion that their audiences “must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will.” Quantity over quality seems to be the manta; and publishers are paying a hefty price for their shoddy craftsmanship.

Make no mistake, the digital publishing realm is a world within itself. Cyberspace happens to be real estate; and publishers failed to fortify their kingdoms when they colonized their online  territories. Metaphorically speaking, they entrusted pirates to patrol their waters at the outset. Gradually, the pirates established strongholds within the publishing castles and extorted their naivety. Today, these pirates hold the publishing world hostage; charging those they deem fit a king’s ransom to publicize and distribute their wares to the public at large.

By pirates, we are referring to search engines, social media companies and content aggregators (specifically: the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube). Perniciously, they have a stranglehold on the distribution and circulation of Web content. In parallel, these same companies also control a lion’s share of the advertising market within the online publishing world. Like robber barons of the 19th Century, the tech giants have created monopolistic empires of their own, decimating the publishing industry and leaving behind a wake of public discord in the process.

We will examine the genesis of the present situation in this article. We will also explain why the status quo has become a threat to democracies around the world as well as our own Constitutional Republic here at home. Lastly, we will offer our thoughts on how to best balance the playing field and hopefully restore public trust in our media institutions.  
 

Just the Facts, Ma’am
A free fall within the publishing industry has been evident for years. In 2013, U.S. newspaper circulation fell below the lowest level in recorded history as digital consumption became more mainstream.  According to PEW Research, the shrinkage has continued at an astounding rate since then. In 2018 for example, the combined circulation for print & digital daily newspapers in the U.S. fell 8% for weekdays and 9% for Sundays. Sadly, the future looks even bleaker for publishers if present trends continue.
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Revenue for magazine and periodical publishers was expected to decline 13.8% in 2020 according to IBISWorld. As revenues from print advertising dry up, digital revenue streams simply are not accounting for the difference. This isn’t surprising given that the bulk of revenues generated through digital advertising (52%) now go to Facebook and Google rather than to the publishers themselves.

​But why? Prior to the digital revolution, publishing houses typically had in-house sales teams that aggressively pursued advertisers themselves. It was as much an art as it was a science; and it served both the publisher and the advertiser quite well.

For instance, publishers could command premiums for the most visible advertising spaces; and repeat advertisers could (and would) often tell stories to their audiences within their real estate from issue to issue. Absolut Vodka’s advertising campaign of the 80’s & 90’s is one of the best examples.

​As a whole, publishers and the media failed to fully assess the governing dynamics of the World Wide Web when they launched their digital ventures. They did not have to make each & every article, story, news piece, opinion column and publication under their license visible for the entire world to see. However, for some inexplicable reason, this is precisely what most publishers and news organizations chose to do. Instead of protecting and nurturing their intellectual properties as treasured assets, both industries effectively treated their intellectual property like trash and dumped them onto the World Wide Web. 

​Picture cyberspace as a solar system and the World Wide Web as a planet within that system. Now imagine you were a publishing mogul looking to set up shop on that planet. You probably would not dump your wares onto the surface of that planet without understanding and testing the terrain first. Yet, this is essentially what a vast majority of publishers and news outlets did when they launched their online publishing ventures.

The surface of the Web itself happens to be fluid and transparent. Adroit travelers within cyberspace are able to see everything on the surface web at quick glance; meaning that it’s ripe for piracy and theft. Much like the surface of the Earth; most of the solid ground on the Web lies well below the planetary surface.

In aggregate, the Web’s subterranean layers are known the deep web which is often ignorantly conflated with the dark web - the Web’s murky undersurface that is permeated with illegal content. That said, the deep Web is where the bedrock lies. In fact, around 90% of the world’s websites exist within the deep web rather than the surface web. Sites within the deep web are not indexed by the search engines and oftentimes aren’t made visible to the public in general. Additionally, websites within the deep web are frequently encrypted to ward off pirating operations as well as hackers.

When publishers first launched into cyberspace and claimed their domains on the Web, hackers were a clear predatory threat. Consequently, protocols were quickly established within the surface web to deter hackers. Savvy tech pirates on the other hand, were lying in wait. Many of them appeared innocuous on the surface. They had a native understanding of the Web’s subterrain and were often collegial toward publishers. However, business ventures are a combination of war and sport and pirate captains soon prepared their vessels to perform stealth forms of grand larceny within the publishing world.

Houston, We Have a Problem
The original champions of the World Wide Web were long on dreams and big on aspirations. In a 1994 speech to the International Telecommunications Union, then Vice-President Al Gore remarked:

​“In this decade, at this conference, we now have at hand the technological breakthroughs and economic means to bring all the communities of the world together. We now can at last create a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village on every continent.”

He went on to say that “to accomplish this purpose, legislators, regulators, and business people must do this: build and operate a Global Information Infrastructure. This GII will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel.” 

That said, he emphasized that the National Information Infrastructure as he called it, would be “built and maintained” by the private sector. He envisioned an architecture consisting of hundreds of different networks, varying technologies and run by a multitude of companies.

Like many tech visionaries of the period, Mr. Gore envisioned a utopian “marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products” available to everyone within free society. Effectively, they equated the distribution of data and access to information with knowledge transference. In general, he and many others tended to view the emerging cyber world with rose colored glasses. They seemingly imagined that collaboration and friendly competition would prevail in perpetuity for the greater good.
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Time has proven these visionaries shortsighted and unpragmatic. They either ignored, were oblivious to, or had forgotten that immense political and social upheavals inevitably followed every major technological advancement throughout all prior human history. In his 1996 essay Content Is King, Bill Gates alluded to what was to come:

​“I expect societies will see intense competition-and ample failure as well as success-in all categories of popular content-not just software and news, but also games, entertainment, sports programming, directories, classified advertising, and on-line communities devoted to major interests.”

Mr. Gates fully recognized the viability of the emerging markets as well as their enormous potential for scale. He also implied that social upheaval of some sort would be inevitable as macroeconomic principles played out over time. In those days, cyberspace was much like the North American continent during the 17th century. In effect, the World Wide Web would be an ethereal fountain for new raw materials with computer code comprising the basic elements.

Navigational maps would be required to conquer the terrain. They would be required to link people and institutions together; and to effectively promote trade. Also, library systems would have to be built to warehouse the perpetually renewing supply of maps. Inevitably, something along the lines of the Great Library of Alexandria would need to be built for the public at large to catch on and colonize the Web.

Intuitively, one would think that visionaries and architects devising the National Information Infrastructure would have realized this at the outset and built one into their rollout plan. Yet, it was left entirely up to the private sector to develop, build, and maintain them instead. Consequently, rudimentary libraries sprouted up throughout the 1990s. They are of course known as search engines today.

The first of these search engines was named Archie. Archie made its debut in 1990. That said, it was more of a simple card catalog than an exploratory tool for Web. Archie was followed by W3Catalog and JumpStation in 1993. Jumpstation was the first search engine to combine crawling, indexing and searching all into one package; features which are now industry standards. This innovation was followed in 1994 by Webcrawler; the first tool that enabled visitors to search for any word on any webpage, which is also of course an industry standard today.

During the latter part of the decade, competition within this category heated up as Web usage became more mainstream. Several search engines debuted during this period vying for popularity. Among the better known: Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista.

Then in 2000, Google gained traction. The brainchild of entrepreneurs Sergey Brin and Larry Page quickly rose to the forefront of the market largely due to their sophisticated PageRank system as well as their novel paid-search capabilities. Both were game-changing features as far as e-commerce was concerned, especially for publishers, entertainment companies and media outlets. For that matter, an argument can be made for the whole of Western civilization as well.
 

The Booty Call
Mr. Brin & Mr. Page met as undergrads at Stanford University. Mathematical geniuses armed with computer science backgrounds; they set out to change our world by  organizing and cataloging the World Wide Web in an effective and easy to reach manner. A sophisticated mathematical gear system was at the heart of their solution, better known today as algorithms. The machinery they developed was groundbreaking to say the least.

From the outset, Google’s product had an intuitive end-user interface and an engaging demeanor. It was also fast and efficient. Beyond that, Brin & Page’s search engine was generations ahead of their competition mechanically. Both factors were enormous competitive advantages and they quickly leaped to the top of the market. The company has remained there ever since; driving most of their competitors into the graveyard.
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Being one of the greatest free-market success stories of all-time, tales of Google’s origin, founding and history are widely known. Most suggest an earnest desire to change the world for the better during the company's nascency. Journalist Steven Levy provides such an example in his book: In the Plex, recounting the origin of the Google’s infamous slogan ‘Don’t Be Evil’:

Paul Buchheit was thinking, This is lame. Jawboning about citizenship and values seemed like the kind of thing you do at a big company. He’d seen enough of that at his previous job at Intel. At one point the chipmaker had given employees little cards with a list of values you could attach to your badge. If something objectionable came up you were to look at your little corporate values card and say, “This violates value number five.” Lame. “That whole thing rubbed me the wrong way,” Buchheit later recalled. “So I suggested something that would make people feel uncomfortable but also be interesting. It popped into my mind that ‘Don’t be evil’ would be a catchy and interesting statement. And people laughed. But l said, ‘No, reaIIy.”’

The slogan made Stacy Sullivan uncomfortable. It was so negative. “Can’t we phrase it as ‘Do the right thing’ or something more positive?” she asked. Marissa and Salar agreed with her. But the geeks—Buchheit and Patel—wouldn’t budge. “Don’t be evil” pretty much said it all, as far as they were concerned. They fought off every attempt to drop it from the list.
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“They liked it the way it was,” Sullivan would later say with a sigh. “It was very important to engineering that they were not going to be like Microsoft, they were not going to be an evil company.”

Today, the Google brand is synonymous with Web search in much the same way that the term Mafia is synonymous with organized crime. An accurarate analogy because, Google’s business model had dubious underpinnings from the outset no matter how noble their founding origins may have been.

For starters, Google’s PageRank methodology was rife for corruption. Instead of assessing the overall value of a particular website on a given topic or Search term, their Web Crawler scours every visible published page to monetize the value. Like a submarine with a periscope, Google’s algorithmic machinery then targets and prioritizes pages based on their potential yield – for their preferred partners as well as for themselves instead of for their patrons.

​And while Google’s founders insist that they were not moved by money, they were entrepreneurs at heart and ingrained their passion for success within the corporate culture. Regardless of their profit motives, competing to win has always been a strategic imperative for the company. As Mr. Brin once remarked: “We want Google to be the third half of your brain.”

The company understood from the outset that the World Wide Web happens to be a world of real estate. A world comprised of the elements visible to the naked eye and measured by occupancy. Over time, the search industry’s 800-pound gorilla has effectively built locks on both.

Google’s domain is arguably the most valuable piece of cyber real estate ever created as far as occupancy is concerned. More people visit Google every single day than other site on the Web. They also spend a great deal of time there. An average of 16 minutes per day; taking in over 17 page views during their stays.

Early in the game, publishers and the media seemingly thought allowing Search Engines like Google to freely crawl, catalog, and index everything they created was a wise and business savvy idea. Time has proven them wrong. At least for the ones that consistently fail to appear above the fold on Google’s first page of search results that is. Google has controlled over 86% of the global Search market for well over a decade. On top of  that, they presently have a stranglehold on the industry’s advertising market – estimated at over 80% for 2019. In short, the conglomerate has effectively monopolized both industries.

Make no mistake, free press in America is no longer free. In effect, the media and the press have acquiesced to a sophisticated band of pirates who pilfer their profits and arbitrarily doll out their creative assets to the public. Online publicity has essentially become a pay-for-play racket over the years. Arguably, designed along the same lines as the Payola schemes that have scandalized the music industry off and on again since the 1950s. Like a mafioso godfather, Google demands tribute. And the publishing world willingly lines up to kiss their ring day in and day out. 
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Mr. Brin & Mr. Page no doubt had a sense of humor about them when they christened their pirate vessel. They originally dubbed Google’s new technology BackRub – a tongue-in-cheek phrase used within underworld establishments that are known to supply Happy Endings to their clientele. God knows if they had this in mind when they set out to conquer the Internet. That said, the monopoly they spawned within their dorm rooms has since grown to become the most powerful member of an oligarchical information technology syndicate. A syndicate that has grown so powerful that it now threatens the very fabric of free society.
 
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What We’ve Got Here Is Failure to Communicate
It is little wonder that Western civilization began to fragment almost in parallel with Mr. Gore’s 1994 speech. Competition within the news and entertainment industries went into hyperdrive with the advent of the Web. With the internet, fringe publications were no longer hidden behind the counter of a local newsstand. Instead, they were right out in the open for all the world to see. Everything from hardcore pornography and violent videotaped crimes; to exploitative human tragedy exposes and even the narcissistic rantings of deranged sycophants. The public gobbled this garbage up like kids in a candy store and they continue to do so today

Quickly, mainstream media outlets began to lose a substantial share of their market to boundary-pushing upstarts. The explosion of online social media in the mid-2000’s furthered the exodus. In the United Kingdom for example, broadcast television experienced a 25% decline in viewership during the 2010’s. Similarly, U.S. television viewership has dropped an astounding 36% over the last eight years as more and more Americans continue to turn to online sources for their news & entertainment.

Consider these figures and their implications:

• 33% of American adults have no trust at all in mass media according to a recent Gallup poll.
• An additional 27% of those surveyed reported having very little trust.
• Only 9% of those surveyed have full confidence in America’s media establishments.

Last year, American media’s trust factor sank to the second-lowest level in half a century per Gallup. Even more alarming, the 33% of Americans who indicate that they completely distrust the media is an all-time high in the 48 years history of Gallup's poll.
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And why wouldn’t the general public distrust the so-called 'mainstream media'? The marketplace for news and information is hypercompetitive today. An oligopoly controls a bulk of the produce; and they have nearly eliminated scale. Media monkeys frantically compete with one another to get their share of bananas for their organ grinders - quality be damned. This analogy aptly applies to media executives that bow before Big Tech’s moguls as if they were an Emperor; as well as the frontline reporters tasked with spewing out garbage 24/7.

Another Fine Mess
Because an overwhelming majority of American adults (82%) now obtain all or some of their news online, Google and their brethren within the Social Networking industry wield ungodly power. Power to shape and form public opinion well-beyond any other media conglomerate that has ever existed.

Far more threatening, they also have power to bend and manipulate political decisions around the world in a direction of their choosing. Case in point, the 2020 U.S. election campaigns.
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From an unbiased standpoint, it is nearly impossible to argue that Big Tech did not lean heavily in favor one political party over another in 2020. The rampant reports of online censorship and corporate collusion are damning because the facts ring true. Nowhere was this more evident than in the 2020 Presidential election campaigns. Time Magazine’s National Political Correspondent Molly Ball even boasted about it in an article shortly after the election. She writes in The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election that:

Quinn’s research gave ammunition to advocates pushing social media platforms to take a harder line. In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home, where they warned him about the danger of the election-related falsehoods that were already spreading unchecked. “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others. (Gupta has been nominated for Associate Attorney General by President Biden.) “It was a struggle, but we got to the point where they understood the problem. Was it enough? Probably not. Was it later than we wanted? Yes. But it was really important, given the level of official disinformation, that they had those rules in place and were tagging things and taking them down.”

​In other words, Big Tech assumed the role of moral arbiters on behalf of the Democrat Party and their organized affiliates. If you happen to be a student of early 20th century history, this should send shivers up your spine. This is exactly what fascist and communist regimes of that period did with big industry. They seized control of mass communications deemed, distorted and twisted the truth, and stymied dissent in order to extinguish any and all opposition to their will. The atrocities committed by autocrats in within both systems speak to the consequences.

We are seeing more of the same today out of big tech. Like greedy European industrial profiteers the did with the Nazi and Soviet regimes, Silicon Valley's pirate captains are presently settling into an unholy alliance with China’s fascist regime. America's tech giants deliberately tilted their algorithms toward one side of the political equation in advance of the 2020 elections in order to to serve their overseas corporate interests; Our nation is now sliding toward tyranny. Our Bill of Rights and the free market be damned for all eternity if this trend continues.
 
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All that Glitters Isn’t Gold
Vice President Gore delivered a second speech on the UCLA campus in 1994 where he remarked that: “the future of language is in our hands. Or put more broadly, the future of communications.” He went on to share a parable by author Toni Morrison:

“It was about a blind old woman renowned for her wisdom, and a boy who decided to try to play a trick on her. He captured a small bird, cupped it in his hands, and said to her, "Old woman, is this bird alive or dead?"

If she said "Dead," he planned to set it free and prove her wrong. If she said "Alive," he planned to quickly crush its life away and prove her wrong.
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She thought a moment and said, "The answer is in your hands."”

Ironically, mass communications have not been nurtured. The buckshot approach taken by the Clinton Administration to catalog and index the Internet backfired on the public. Foolishly, politicians allowed carnivores into Publisher’s hen houses. Obliviously or corruptly, they have taken handouts from Big Tech fat cats and overlooked the best interests of their constituency.  Our inalienable rights are now being crushed or smothered by capitalist wolves in the hands of greedy communist pigs largely in consequence.

Marie-Antoinette was infamously quoted for saying: Let them eat cake. That’s effectively what the unholy alliance between Big Tech and our mainstream media establishments have been feeding news consumers for years: sugar mixed with poison. And the public has developed a large addiction problem.

According to PEW research, there were 37 digital-native news outlets as of 2018 that averaged 22.4 million unique viewers each month. The typical viewer only consumed two minutes-worth of news each jaunt. Imagine you only had two-minutes to prepare your meal each morning. That leaves little time to discern what is good for you let alone digest a meal.
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In closing, the Big Tech consortium has produced little in return for the good faith entrusted upon them by our government officials. For instance, the American literacy rate has not improved over the past 25 year. Furthermore, despite near-universal access more reading material than the world has ever known through the internet and our mobile devices, The Read Center reports that 1 in 6 adults cannot read above a 4th grade level today. More remarkable, The World Literacy Foundation recently estimated that 2/3 of Americans could not pass a basic financial literacy test covering credit, interest, investing diversification and inflation.

In other words, Leonard Cohen’s song Everybody Knows seems prophetic: “the poor stay poor and the rich get rich”. If the pendulum doesn’t adjust soon, a day of reckoning will no doubt soon occur.  As former President Ronald Reagan once remarked: "Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.” The Time of Choosing he eloquently in his speech outlined is well at hand.
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Time to Rise Up
The time has come to break up the Big Tech’s four horsemen for the good of the nation and all of humanity. Congress must recognize Amazon, Facebook, Google & Twitter's key commodity happens to be information capital. Everything you do or say online can be monetized; meaning that an individual's right to privacy effectively no longer exists.  Worse still, beyond the inherent threat to our personal liberties and guaranteed freedoms; there is perhaps an even greater threat to our national security interests if the Big Tech oligarchs continue to remain unchecked.

With the exception of Amazon, Big Tech’s other three horsemen effectively serve as public utilities in the digital age. Collectively, the top brass within these companies effectively dictate and control the flow of information from town to town and city to city across the country. Facebook being akin to Bell Telephone and National Public Radio; and Twitter being world's “town square” so to speak. Similarly as we've mentioned, Google effectively serves as a global public library; and an argument could be made that their conglomerate also serves as a sort of mass transit system within the cyber world as far as business and commerce are concerned.

Beyond the breakup, re-formulating America's communications infrastructure will require an innovative approach. Re-tooling our National Library system seems a natural place to start. The information superhighway requires a Grand Central Station; and the National Library has the potential to serve as such if were retooled and properly scaled.

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Therefore let us stop passing judgement on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way.  As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean.  your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died.  Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil.   For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating or drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Sprit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men.

Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and mutual edification.  Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, But it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble.
 ROMANS 14:9-21

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​​Author: Erik Gagnon - Managing Partner, Chi Rho Consulting