Join with me to create a media company which is directly associated with an Internet company (where’ve we seen that before?) but use the media company to ask government to make it illegal for a media company to be affiliated with, joined to, or subordinate to, an Internet company. There’s the irony, make something an argue against it’s right to exist.

My supervisor at the Federation of Agriculture used to have a fit every time I told farmers that the Internet is the “democratization of information technology”; she seriously thought farmers would feel threatened by someone speaking to them like that. I had a higher opinion of them, but that’s another matter. The point is, it has become clear that when media companies are doing the bidding of communication companies (or the other way around) democracy is rotting into soviet sludge (central control).

Being able to communicate with mass numbers is so economically powerful that underlying structures, including whole companies, will fall into serving the media interest. That’s fine if it’s a private company like, say, a print company serving a newspaper company — as long as there are other printers I can go to. But when the subordinate technology company runs everyone’s Internet it simply fails to be rational for the technology company to operate our Internet in our interests.

So why take issue with a media company being “subordinate to” an Internet company, but then go on to make the case that the media company will dominate? (I’m broadly defining “Internet company” as including telcos since they’re all in the game.) Well, it’s because that’s how it goes (that’s how it went, at least):

Island Tel used be a 50% partner in PEINet (PEI’s first Internet company). Island Tel had little or no interest in content, and about as much expertise. They wanted to rent wires and make money from using their infrastructure. On-Line Support (not the same company as the support company) was considered to be the “civilian” partner. OLS would look after marketing the thing and would, almost as a reluctance, have to be involved in creating some content for people to look at. I remember those early efforts as kindergarten-like ‘cut-and-paste’ sessions. No one had anything they wanted to say, and they had no one to say it to, but they did understand “we’d better give people interesting things to read and look at or we’re not going to sell much of this Internet stuff”.

Many think there was a “falling out” between J. Hill and Island Tel, and there may have been, but I’ll bet’cha if a falling out did exist it was engineered by what is now Aliant (a group of senior managers who were planning a full merger of all Atlantic telcos and full domination of communications infrastructure). Almost perfectly timed with their pull-out from PEINet, senior managers at Island Tel began talking about “content”. They never shut up about it. What happened? Well, clearly they’d all attended the same management seminar where they were told that “content” wasn’t something used to hold a person’s attention while they buy something (the PEINet model), but it was in fact something used to instruct them what to buy (the Bell Canada model).

We know the most effective economic system is regulated capitalism; perhaps it’s more that it’s the worst we have except for all the rest. Either way, as fast as collective resources, used cooperatively in an atmosphere of sharing, manages to create something, capitalism comes along and takes it away. Trouble is, capitalism, like a virus, is mutating into a resistant form which seems to be immune to regulation. It would appear it has developed a “protien” which looks for all the world like a senior telco official who warmly shares technolgy tips with over-streached government officials who posess no resistance.

Now, on to step three.