Commentators around the world are still trying to make sense of Google’s $1.7 billion acquisition of YouTube: is it the end of a free-wheeling era or the beginning of a Golden Information Age? Should we be worried or celebratory? Has anything really changed?

Randall Rothenberg, commenting in the LA Times, claims that YouTube is nothing more than the “triumph of radical left-wing politics — which means it’s just as likely to subvert business as to support its reinvention.” Because of sites like YouTube, MySpace, and the blogosphere, the costs of media are rapidly approaching zero, decentralizing production from corporations to the masses.

Yet, corporations, if nothing else, are resilient; it’s hard to imagine billion-dollar companies rolling over to a cyber-dictatorship of the e-proletariat without a fight. For all Mr. Rothenberg’s optimism about the “ultimate tool with unlimited access,” the Internet is still controlled by a handful of massive businesses, each with the resources to keep profits high and Wall St. happy at the expense of total online freedom.

While the desire for individuality should always act as a check on corporate ambitions, both the users and owners of the Internet need each other to realize their respective goals; maybe the whole thing will just be a long-running Red Queen’s race, with neither ever gaining the upper hand.

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See Also: Daylight Savings Time: A Liberal Plot?,Diversion: La Rivière du Hibou,Google Buys YouTube, Tubes, You,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 10:05 am and is filed under Social Change, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.