Noam Chomsky on Microsoft and Corporate
Control of the Internet(excerpt)

By Anna Couey and Joshua Karliner
From CorpWatch

CW: Do you think the whole monopoly issue is something to be concerned about?

NC: These are oligopolies; they are small groups of highly concentrated power systems which are integrated with one another. If one of them were to get total control of some system, other powers probably wouldn't allow it. In fact, that's what you're seeing.

CW: So, you don't think Bill Gates is a latter-day John D. Rockefeller?

NC: John D. Rockefeller wasn't a monopolist. Standard Oil didn't run the whole industry; they tried. But other power centers simply don't want to allow that amount of power to one of them.

CW: Then in fact, maybe there is a parallel there between Gates and Rockefeller, or not?

NC: Think of the feudal system. You had kings and princes and bishops and lords and so on. They for the most part did not want power to be totally concentrated, they didn't want total tyrants. They each had their fiefdoms they wanted to maintain in a system of highly concentrated power. They just wanted to make sure the population, the rabble so-called, wouldn't be part of it. It's for this reason the question of monopoly -- I don't want to say it's not important -- but it's by no means the core of the issue.

It is indeed unlikely that any pure monopoly could be sustained. Remember that this changing technology that they're talking about is overwhelmingly technology that's developed at public initiative and public expense. Like the Internet after all, 30 years of development by the public then handed over to private power. That's market capitalism.

CW: How has that transfer from the public to the private sphere changed the Internet?

NC: As long as the Internet was under control of the Pentagon, it was free. People could use it freely [for] information sharing. That remained true when it stayed within the state sector of the National Science Foundation.

As late as about 1994, people like say, Bill Gates, had no interest in the Internet. He wouldn't even go to conferences about it, because he didn't see a way to make a profit from it. Now it's being handed over to private corporations, and they tell you pretty much what they want to do. They want to take large parts of the Internet and cut it out of the public domain altogether, turn it into intranets, which are fenced off with firewalls, and used simply for internal corporate operations.

They want to control access, and that's a large part of Microsoft's efforts: control access in such a way that people who access the Internet will be guided to things that *they* want, like home marketing service, or diversion, or something or other. If you really know exactly what you want to find, and have enough information and energy, you may be able to find what you want. But they want to make that as difficult as possible. And that's perfectly natural. If you were on the board of directors of Microsoft, sure, that's what you'd try to do.

Well, you know, these things don't *have* to happen. The public institution created a public entity which can be kept under public control. But that's going to mean a lot of hard work at every level, from Congress down to local organizations, unions, other citizens' groups which will struggle against it in all the usual ways.

CW: What would it look like if it were under public control?

NC: It would look like it did before, except much more accessible because more people would have access to it. And with no constraints. People could just use it freely. That has been done, as long as it was in the public domain. It wasn't perfect, but it had more or less the right kind of structure. That's what Microsoft and others want to destroy.

CW: And when you say that, you're referring to the Internet as it was 15 years ago.

NC: We're specifically talking about the Internet. But more generally the media has for most of this century, and increasingly in recent years, been under corporate power. But that's not always been the case. It doesn't have to be the case. We don't have to go back very far to find differences. As recently as the 1950s, there were about 800 labor newspapers reaching 20-30 million people a week, with a very different point of view. You go back further, the community-based and labor-based and other media were basically on par with the corporate media early in this century. These are not laws of nature, they're just the results of high concentration of power granted by the state through judicial activism and other private pressure, which can be reversed and overcome.

CW: So take the increasing concentration in the technology that we're looking at with Microsoft and some of these other companies, and compare it with recent mergers in the defense, media, insurance, and banking industries, and especially the context of globalization . Are we looking at a new stage in global capitalism, or is this just a continuation of business as usual?

NC: By gross measures, contemporary globalization is bringing the world back to what it was about a century ago. In the early part of the century, under basically British domination and the gold standard, if you look at the amount of trade, and then the financial flow, and so on, relative to the size of the economy, we're pretty much returning to that now, after a decline between the two World Wars.

Now there are some differences. For example, the speed of financial transactions has been much enhanced in the last 25 years through the so-called telecommunications revolution, which was a revolution largely within the state sector. Most of the system was designed, developed, and maintained at public expense, then handed over to private profit.

State actions also broke down the post-war international economic system, the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. It was dismantled by Richard Nixon, with US and British initiative primarily. The system of regulation of capital flows was dismantled, and that, along with the state-initiated telecommunications revolution led to an enormous explosion of speculative capital flow, which is now well over a trillion dollars a day, and is mostly non-productive. If you go back to around 1970, international capital flows were about 90% related to the real economy, like trade and investment. By now, at most a few percent are related to the real economy. Most have to do with financial manipulations, speculations against currencies, things which are really destructive to the economy. And that is a change that wasn't true, not only wasn't true 100 years ago, it wasn't true 40 years ago. So there are changes. And you can see their effects.

That's surely part of the reason for the fact that the recent period, the last 25 years, has been a period of unusually slow economic growth, of low productivity growth, of stagnation or decline of wages and incomes for probably two thirds of the population, even in a rich country like this. And enormously high profits for a very small part of the population. And it's worse in the Third World.

You can read in the New York Times, the lead article in the "Week in Review" yesterday, Sunday, April 12, that America is prospering and happy. And you look at the Americans they're talking about, it turns out it's not the roughly two thirds of the population whose incomes are stagnating or declining, it's the people who own stock. So, ok, they're undoubtedly doing great, except that about 1% of households have about 50% of the stock, and it's roughly the same with other assets. Most of the rest is owned by the top 10% of the population. So sure, America is happy, and America is prosperous, if America means what the New York Times means by it. They're the narrow set of elites that they speak for and to.

CW: We are curious about this potential for many-to-many communications, and the fact that software, as a way of doing things carries cultural values, and impacts language and perception. And what kind of impacts there are around having technology being developed by corporations such as Microsoft.

NC: I don't think there's really any answer to that. It depends who's participating, who's active, who's influencing the direction of things, and so on. If it's being influenced and controlled by the Disney Corporation and others it will reflect their interests. If there is largely public initiative, then it will reflect public interests.

CW: So it gets back to the question of taking it back.

NC: That's the question. Ultimately it's a question of whether democracy's going to be allowed to exist, and to what extent. And it's entirely natural that the business world, along with the state, which they largely dominate, would want to limit democracy. It threatens them. It always has been threatening. That's why we have a huge public relations industry dedicated to, as they put it, controlling the public mind.

CW: What kinds of things can people do to try to expand and reclaim democracy and the public space from corporations?

NC: Well, the first thing they have to do is find out what's happening to them. So if you have none of that information, you can't do much. For example, it's impossible to oppose, say, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, if you don't know it exists. That's the point of the secrecy. You can't oppose the specific form of globalization that's taking place, unless you understand it. You'd have to not only read the headlines which say market economy's triumphed, but you also have to read Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, when he's talking internally; when he says, look the health of the economy depends on a wonderful achievement that we've brought about, namely "worker insecurity." That's his term. Worker insecurity--that is not knowing if you're going to have a job tomorrow. It is a great boon for the health of the economy because it keeps wages down. It's great: it keeps profits up and wages down.

Well, unless people know those things, they can't do much about them. So the first thing that has to be done is to create for ourselves, for the population, systems of interchange, interaction, and so on. Like CorpWatch, Public Citizen, other popular groupings, which provide to the public the kinds of information and understanding, that they won't otherwise have. After that they have to struggle against it, in lots of ways which are open to them. It can be done right through pressure on Congress, or demonstrations, or creation of alternative institutions. And it should aim, in my opinion, not just at narrow questions, like preventing monopoly, but also at deeper questions, like why do private tyrannies have rights altogether?

CW: What do you think about the potential of all the alternative media that's burgeoning on the Internet, given the current trends?

NC: That's a matter for action, not for speculation. It's like asking 40 years ago what's the likelihood that we'd have a minimal health care system like Medicare? These things happen if people struggle for them. The business world, Microsoft, they're highly class conscious. They're basically vulgar marxists, who see themselves engaged in a bitter class struggle. Of course they're always going to be at it. The question is whether they have that field to themselves. And the deeper question is whether they should be allowed to participate; I don't think they should.