Technology monopolies don’t bode well for creative industries
Every new technology changes how we find and experience art and entertainment, for better and worse.
Today, as streaming becomes the dominant delivery mode for creative content, a new world of instant, global, direct connection between artists and their fans is at hand.
The potential is glorious — ease of access, openness, a search for new content and the ability through broadband and digitization to enjoy high quality audio and video anywhere, on demand. But the new streaming media also come with alarming trends.
The most frightening of these is the headlong charge toward monopoly. Facebook and Google don’t “sell” things — they “connect” people to one another. They are “networks,” not merchants. That inherently leads to monopoly — of what good are two Facebooks or YouTubes? But, for content creators, that inherent monopoly threatens to scramble the relationship between creators and their fans, destabilizing the carefully constructed legal, economic and social balance between the two.
That is what the creative community is up against. Google controls two-thirds of U.S. internet searches and together with Facebook nearly 80 percent of digital ads. By one measure, 85 percent of Americans who go online are Facebook members. Amazon has mushroomed into a dominant position in so many markets it’s called the Everything Store.
And artists and creators should be very concerned that Google’s YouTube service has now set its sights on the music business, growing from an afterthought just a few years ago to controlling 25 percent of all listening today. More than two-thirds of Americans have used YouTube to listen to music online.
Similarly, many observers expect a new wave of consolidation in video as the Big Tech platforms try to aggregate control of today’s diverse video streaming options. They seek no less than to be the gatekeepers who determine what audiences see and hear — and what creators can earn.
The results of having perhaps the world’s most powerful company dominating the distribution of the creative arts are what you’d expect. Google’s predatory royalty practices pay creators as little as one-seventh of what companies such as Spotify and Apple Music do. It forces those terms on creators, in part, by turning a blind eye to illegal piracy on its platform, forcing artists to compete with unlicensed and unpaid-for copies of their own songs and recordings.
YouTube uses this stew of market power and unchecked piracy to cement its status as the most vital channel for reaching fans, to pay the lowest royalty rates and to do as little as possible to protect artists from theft of their works.
After years of marveling at Big Tech and the opportunities created by digitization and instant global distribution of art, it is time to scrutinize the platform monopolies that dominate the internet and seek to capture and exploit the work of creators for themselves. It’s time to check rising abuses and anti-creator practices so that the talents that fuel our nation’s musical heritage and cultural growth get a fair share of the benefits of the broadband world.
We need a new transparency and accountability that holds Silicon Valley to the same kinds of rules that have restrained other monopolists in the past. The algorithm black box must be opened and subjected to rigorous scrutiny to assure a level, competitive playing field. If needed, we should separate online search, advertising, streaming platforms and other related businesses to curb market power and prevent abuse. And we need to narrow the archaic “safe harbors” in federal copyright law that allow these platforms to profit from illegal piracy on their networks.
Today’s technological changes bring huge opportunities to make, distribute and experience artistic achievement in new ways. But they also threaten to commoditize and control the creative industries and drain our culture of the diversity and variety that is its signature.
When the same algorithms that brought us fake news and a Russian-manipulated election are used to determine which songs and programs take center stage in the digital market and which land in cyberspace’s empty cul-de-sacs, something vital and fundamental will have been lost.
It’s time for regulators to face this challenge and assure that our society’s entertainment and culture are not consolidated, compromised and managed by a very few hands.
Re: Jan. 17 article, “Austin trustee calls out peers over Confederate school names in MLK
Amazing. That’s all I can say for the four council members who voted for the amendment to alleviate the huge traffic flow on Apache Mountain Lane.
These four people have devoted hours to studying this issue and made the difficult and unpopular choice of voting for the safety and peace of the community. The truly amazing part is that I am not in their district. These dedicated people voted to do the right thing. Good news like that is rare these days.