eight pages (-87_

CHAPTER 4

THE OLIGOPOLY’S STRATEGIES FOR INTEGRATION AND

INFOMEDIATION

In the preceding chapter, I have tried to show how the internet oligopoly takes advantage of a number of conditions to maxi- mise its profitability and consolidate its oligopolistic position to satisfy shareholders. Although sometimes encouraged by the nature of the business, this oligopoly’s strategies are not unique but are common to most multinational and financia- lized companies. However, what is central and special about the oligopoly is that it seeks to manage and control the two general functions of the internet: interpersonal communica- tion and content dissemination over digital media, in addition to any other activity that occurs there. In other words, the main objective of the oligopoly is to control infomediation, defined as the set of socio-technical mechanisms such as soft- ware, services and infrastructures that provide internet users with all types of information online and connect them with other users.1

83

INFOMEDIATION: A KEY FUNCTION OF THE INTERNET

Over the past years, an important body of research has devel- oped on this subject, often termed ‘Platform studies’.2

Although this current of thought does not claim a direct link with the field of political economy, they share many similar- ities within a broader understanding of a materialist approach to mass communication.3 Platform studies emphasise analys- ing the social, economic and political dimensions of communi- cation together, although with a stronger focus on purely technical aspects.4 Platform studies are interesting in the con- text of the present book in several respects. On an ideological level, the concept of platformisation refers to a ‘populist ethos’ and a supposedly ‘progressive and egalitarian arrangement’ that ‘fits neatly with the long-standing rhetoric about the democratising potential of the Internet, and with the more recent enthusiasm for user-generated content (UGC), amateur expertise, popular creativity, peer-level social networking, and robust online commentary’.5 Yet this discourse masks the growing privatisation and commodification of utilities and infrastructures under a neoliberal hegemony, as ‘Google, Facebook and a handful of other corporate giants have learned to exploit the power of platforms […] to gain foot- holds as the modern-day equivalents of the railroad, tele- phone, and electric utility monopolies of the late 19th and the 20th centuries’.6 Indeed, when it comes to journalism, Google and Facebook are increasingly replacing the traditional distri- bution systems of the press, TV and radio that have been run or heavily subsidised by governments since the end of the Second World War.

On a socio-technical level, the ‘dual logic of platformisa- tion’ is an ongoing process comprising ‘social media plat- forms’ expansion into the rest of the web and, simultaneously,

84 Internet Oligopoly

their drive to make external web and app data platform ready’.7 In other words, while platforms become omniscient by decentralising their features (e.g. the proliferation of Like and Tweet buttons on news websites), they also massively absorb platform-ready data from a wide range of actors, including cultural content producers and publishers (e.g. con- tent formatted for Instant Articles or Google’s AMP). This growing process is intrinsically asymmetrical since it subju- gates a multitude of individual users, non-profit organisations and firms in competitive markets to a few transnational oli- gopolistic players of the internet industry.

On a microeconomic level, the concept of ‘platform’ focuses on the hybrid nature of companies such as Google and Facebook as both firms and markets. Indeed, their busi- ness models rely on multi-sided markets that bring together various groups such as internet users, advertisers and content or service suppliers. Thus, platforms provide strong incentives to these groups through investments or subsidies, which results in oligopolistic control: “If these subsidies and/or investments are well designed, powerful network effects and economies of scale can lead to a situation in which the appeal of one side of the market is strong enough to capture the entire market on the other”.8 Algorithms are used to maxi- mise the efficiency of these multi-sided markets, and the data flows that result impact the very functioning of entire sectors of activity. Specifically, in the context of journalism, ‘platfor- misation […] entails a shift from an editorially-driven to a demand-driven nexus production and distribution process, in which content is continuously modulated, and repackaged, informed by datafied user feedback’.9

However, Platform Studies and theories neglect the dual nature of cultural products as both ‘commodities and ideas’,10

which is central to the political economy of communication. The type of content that transits through platforms is

85Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

secondary: financial data, commercial transactions, journal- ism, job offers and even companies’ products are all subject to similar mechanisms and effects.11 Thus, Platform Theory neglects a fundamentally political aspect of cultural products, which is that of meaning.12 Here, the question of meaning is three-fold. First, it opposes a holistic approach with a ‘general platformisation’ process, which is simultaneously and homo- genously supposed to affect sectors as different as the media, transport, video games or software. Second, the question of meaning reintroduces the problem of the political power that derives from the dominant internet players’ ability to shape public opinion by forming alliances and even capturing media and public authorities.13 Third, this question reintroduces the editorial rationale of platforms that ! when it comes to culture ! produce socially, semantically and formally mean- ingful ensembles of information. In other words, platforms become infomediaries when they generate complex sets of sig- nifiers that make sense for humans in their social and political context.

Thus, through the use of the concept of infomediation, I aim to reintroduce the question of meaning in the analysis of plat- forms and their particular relations to media. The concept of infomediation was developed in the late 1970s by Canadian researchers Iris Fitzpatrick-Martin and Kimon Valaskakis to refer to and analyse the increasing place in society of techno- logical mediation in society and in the economy.14 At the time, the idea of the ‘post-industrial society’ or ‘information society’ was very much in vogue; these terms referred to the exponential increase in the quantities of information produced and exchanged in economy and society. However, the inventors of the concept of infomediation (informediation in the original text) thought that the main issue was not the amount of infor- mation available, but the way in which computers replaced humans in sorting and organising information. We were,

86 Internet Oligopoly

therefore, not in a ‘post-industrial’ stage, but rather a new phase of industrialisation in a world characterised by the over- abundance of information in all its forms, in which informa- tional intermediation via connected computing was central. For Valaskakis, the issue was deeply political, as he felt the emer- gence of infomediation on a large scale would ultimately upset the distribution of power in society and the economy.15

Information Brokerage and Coopetition

In the 1980s, the concept of infomediation was also used by researchers in information and library sciences, particularly through the English-language journal Infomediary.16 French research inspired by this school described an infomediary as an information broker ‘who acts as a mediator between sources of information (data banks or others) and clients or users’.17 The notion of brokerage was taken up and extended by Pierre Moeglin in his theory of a new socio-economic model of cultural industries, that of information brokerage (courtage informationnel in French), which ‘is distinguished by the centrality it grants to intermediation’.18 Driven by widespread access to networked computing, information bro- kering services sort a wealth of digital information and cul- tural content to provide users with a selection matching their expectations and tastes. These services thus contribute to a form of mass personalisation of cultural and information con- sumption.19 The two main sources of revenue for informa- tional brokerage are commissions paid by sellers and all the data that intermediary brokers can collect about their users and sell them to third parties.

This latter source of income became a central feature in the acceptance of the concept of infomediation as it was popu- larised by economists Hagel and Rayport in the late 1990s.20

87Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

Their research, published in the early days of the internet’s commodification process, tried to imagine the future of the digital economy. They believed that infomediaries would cre- ate value by matching an available supply with the customers most likely to acquire or consume a given good. To do this, infomediaries would use the mountains of information accu- mulated on consumers on the demand side, as well as on those supplying. According to their research, the very structure of this market is oligopolistic because it is subject to strong exter- nalities and network effects. This situation gives an advantage to large players who are able to gain the confidence of both internet users and content and service providers, thus making this market increasingly difficult for new entrants to penetrate. Finally, infomediaries’ relationships with the suppliers of goods and services can be described as coopetitive, that is, both cooperative and competitive.21 The cooperative compo- nent, which takes the form of legal, technical and financial agreements, is justified by their common interest in expanding their respective markets.22 But at the same time, the interests of these two kinds of players diverge when they are in compe- tition for market share, for example in advertising.

Drawing on these theories, I have shown along with others how infomediation is central to the functioning of digital dis- tribution channels for content and services.23 Indeed, in an environment characterised both by the profusion and the dis- persal of the offer, internet users need guides who select, pri- oritise and organise information for them. This function can be done by different kinds of organisations in various con- texts, but infomediation has at least four characteristics: an intermediary position between a supply and a demand; a means for selecting and prioritising information that involves algorithms and mediated social interactions to varying degrees; the production of information aggregated in an edi- torialised form made available to the general public via

88 Internet Oligopoly

dedicated platforms; and finally, business models depending mainly on commissions and using data collected from users for marketing and advertising. Indeed, by providing this basic infrastructure to mediate between different groups, infomedia- tion platforms occupy a key position that allows them to “monopolise, extract, analyse and use the increasingly large amounts of data that [are] being recorded”.24

Google and Facebook: Emblematic Infomediaries

The two iconic infomediation mechanisms are Google’s search engine and Facebook’s News Feed. Both are based on algo- rithms that exploit ‘the automatic aggregation of the uncer- tain, dispersed and random judgments of the crowd of internet users’ for business purposes.25 For Google PageRank, these judgments are based on hyperlinks that link web pages to each other. This calculation, which still plays a major role in the search engine’s overall functioning, is now supplemen- ted by numerous other information signals produced by the online activity of an immense number of humans and compu- ters (the newness and originality of the information, author mention, degree of reader involvement, shares on social net- working sites, HTML markup, attributes, etc.). In addition, Google also offers several specialized infomediation services that simulate the social logics that are predominant in specific domains (Google News, Google Shopping, Google Scholar, Google Play, etc.). As for Facebook, it ranks the appearance of information in its users’ News Feeds using algorithms that take into account not only many interactions inside its plat- form (likes, shares, comments and the intensity of relations between users) but also qualities attributed to the content (for- mat, popularity, newness, etc.). In both cases, these mechan- isms ‘defin[e] metrics to describe the relational forms of the

89Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

social’26 in order to prioritise and assemble information into coherent sets that produce an effective and enjoyable ‘user experience’ while maximising the income of their owners. In so doing, these infomediaries establish an ‘organisational architecture of visibility’ produced by software that deter- mines what can be seen, or not, out of the immense number of possibilities.27 This architecture imposes a certain number of constraints on users, and they ‘activate’ and appropriate that architecture according to various determinants: socio- economic and cultural characteristics, objectives pursued, usage contexts, etc.

However, while Google and Facebook have the prime place among informediaries, all the oligopolistic actors of the internet base part of their business on the same logic: a recom- mendation system for Amazon, selection and prioritisation of iOS applications for Apple or the search engine for Microsoft. Indeed, the emergence and consolidation of infomediation as a pillar of the digital economy has played an important role in reconfiguring the information, culture and communication industries. Infomediation has thus become a major stake in the competition among oligopoly actors each seeking to take control. In order to achieve this, they concentrate both verti- cally and horizontally in order to ensure a direct or indirect presence throughout the entire hardware and software infra- structure needed for delivering content and services to internet users.

THE VERTICAL INTEGRATION OF THE OLIGOPOLY

Vertical integration is defined as bringing together a comple- mentary set of business activities that constitute a production chain under the same decision-making power.28 Apart from software and online services, the oligopoly is present in four

90 Internet Oligopoly

subsets and markets that are part of the infomediation infra- structure: operating systems, consumer electronics, telecom- munications networks and data centres. A close examination of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft reveals that they are all well positioned throughout the chain, either through mergers or acquisitions, stock purchases or exclusive and privileged partnerships with companies that are up- stream or down-stream of their core business.

Computers and Consumer Electronics

Overall, the computer market is dominated by Asian and US firms such as Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, Huawei, LG and Dell. But they try to get as close as possible to the oligopoly players, who occupy a key position that gives access to the general public and who help these manufacturers differentiate their offer. The oldest and most characteristic example of this part- nership is the installation of Windows by default on almost all the PCs available in the mainstream market. Indeed, the PC market is traditionally shared between PC and Mac (92.2% and 7.8% of sales respectively in Q2 of 2015).29

However, in a market that is globally declining in favour of mobile devices, sales of Apple computers are growing strongly. Apple holds the lion’s share of smartphones and tablets, which are the two most dynamic segments of the com- puter electronics industry. In 2015, 44% of smartphone own- ers in the United States owned an iPhone, compared with 27% for its main competitor, Samsung.30 As for tablets, Apple’s share of sales in the second quarter of 2015 was 24.5%, with 17% for Samsung.31 As for Microsoft, in 2014 it bought Nokia, the largest European mobile phone manufac- turer, for h 5.4 billion. Google meanwhile bought Motorola in 2011 for $ 12.5 billion before selling it to Lenovo while

91Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

retaining ownership of many patents. In September 2017, Google announced a $ 1.1 billion bid for HTC, the Taiwanese firm that manufactures Pixel, Google’s smartphone. Google has also very strong ties with manufacturers like Samsung, who ensure the success of its mobile operating system. Amazon is the top player in the e-reader market with Kindle.

Apart from computers, smartphones and tablets, the inter- net oligopoly is also involved with many other consumer elec- tronic devices. For example, Facebook launched the first virtual reality consumer headset via its subsidiary Oculus in collaboration with Samsung. For Facebook, this was a way to penetrate the video game hardware market dominated by Sony, with Microsoft in the second position with its Xbox console, ahead of Nintendo. In early 2015, Microsoft also introduced HoloLens, a headset inserting three-dimensional images into the user’s field of vision to compete directly with the flagship product of MagicLeap, a start-up in which Google invested $ 514 million in 2014. As for wearables, Google is currently developing a new connected eyeglass model after its Explorer version, whose sale ended in 2015. Apple, for its part, has been selling a smartwatch since 2014. Despite their failure commercially, these two products signal the entry of computer equipment into a new era driven by the quantified self movement.32 The proliferation of sensors touching the body and the applications processing that data, such as Facebook’s Moves or Microsoft’s Health Vault, has now created a buoyant market. The same phenomenon can be observed with the increasing computerization of home devices and transport. Google is one of the leaders in research and development of self-driving cars and already sells a multitude of smart home sensors (thermostat, camera and smoke detector) via its subsidiary Nest. Amazon is testing the deliv- ery of packages by drones.33 In December 2017, Amazon and Google dominated the market of smart speakers in the US

92 Internet Oligopoly

with a market share of 69% for Amazon Echo and 25% for Google Home.

Operating Systems

Microsoft and Apple share the market in computer operating systems, as well as in internet browsers. In November 2015, Microsoft had equipped 90% of computers on the market with different versions of Windows, followed by Apple OS with 5%.34 This dominance of Windows probably explains the performance of Internet Explorer, which still has 50% market share of browsers, whereas Apple’s Safari represents only 4%. Google has established strong positions in the mobile media market with its Android operating system and its Chrome browser (31% of market share on the computer and 40% on mobile). Google’s main competitor in these two market segments is Apple with iOS and Safari for mobiles. Given the weakness of other competitors such as Windows Phone, this market is a duopoly dominated by Google and Apple. This is a truly strategic market for at least two reasons: (1) the share of internet access from mobile media has been growing for several years at the expense of access from com- puters; and (2) given the more restricted use of the internet on mobile devices, the app distribution platforms associated with each operating system, App Store for Apple and Google Play, can strongly steer users towards the services and content that they want them to use, in order to benefit the company.

The Cloud

Another strategic market dominated by the internet oligopoly is that of data centres and cloud computing. Cloud computing

93Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

is a powerful system for producing, storing, analysing and distributing data, information, applications and services remotely to organisations and individuals.35 The most charac- teristic image of this market segment, and which is essential to the functioning of the contemporary internet, is that of data centres ! those twenty-first-century factories of enormous hangars with thousands of servers. These computing centres are the result of a series of industrial innovations in equipment and software used to maximise the efficiency of data storage, processing and distribution. They also involve innovations in power generation, cooling systems, network architecture and security. Having this type of equipment en masse is a sine qua non for a company to have a central place in the internet econ- omy. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have the most impres- sive centres with a number of servers exceeding one million for the first and approaching that number for the other two.36

Facebook and Apple follow with several hundred thousand servers each. These extraordinary computing and storage cap- acities are used to host their own services, as well as to store user data, which gives them a serious competitive advantage. Amazon is the world’s leading provider of data centre service for third parties through its Amazon Web Services division. This service represents a growing share of the company’s total revenues with clients such as Netflix and the US government in its portfolio. Microsoft Azure is the second largest provider in this market globally.

Networks

The last link in the internet hardware and software infrastruc- ture chain is telecommunication networks. As with manufac- turing computer equipment, the telecommunications sector is dominated by an oligopoly that is different from the internet

94 Internet Oligopoly

oligopoly. A small number of operators in the Americas (AT & T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and America Movil), Europe (Vodafone, Orange, BT, Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica) and Asia (China Mobile, NTT, Softbank and China Telecom) dominate this market globally. Yet the inter- net oligopoly also has strong positions in this field, such as Microsoft with Skype, Amazon with Whispernet, a wireless network for Kindle and Google with Fiber, the fibre optic net- worked currently present in a dozen US cities and constantly expanding. With Project Loon, Google is also testing ways to provide internet access in remote areas in countries such as Sri Lanka and New Zealand using stratospheric helium bal- loons. The internet oligopoly also works together to install undersea cables. For example, in May 2016, Microsoft and Facebook, together with Telefonica, announced the construc- tion of Marea, a new transatlantic communications cable con- necting Virginia Beach in the United States to Bilbao, Spain, with a transfer capacity far exceeding that of existing cables. Microsoft is very active in this field with numerous projects such as the New Cross Pacific (NCP), an undersea cable that will connect the western side of the United States to China, Korea and Japan.37 These investments will enable Microsoft to be more competitive in the cloud market and improve its bandwidth-intensive services such as Skype and Xbox Live.

But above all, these internet players seem interested in inte- grating mobile access with their offers as a way to extend and deepen their hold over the uses of networked computing. Thus, Google has an MVNO licence (mobile virtual network operator) in the United States using the Sprint and T-Mobile network. Project Fi, as it is named, already has hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the United States who take advan- tage of low prices and a technology that effectively combines the classic mobile network with Wi-Fi.38 Fi is only compatible with the Nexus and Pixel family of devices using Android,

95Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

specially designed by Asian manufacturers for Google, and requires opening a Google account. In other words, this mobile access offer requires the integration of a piece of equip- ment, an operating system and an account giving access to a wide range of online services exclusively offered by Google. This is an excellent way to build a totally captive customer base. As for Facebook, it has launched an initiative called Internet.org in partnership with telecom operators offering free mobile access to millions of users in countries like Kenya, Egypt and Indonesia.39 But under its philanthropic window- dressing, lnternet.org is a truly commercial operation that aims to gain market share for Facebook in developing coun- tries.40 Indeed, the number of Facebook users in Europe and North America has reached its limit and its main vector of growth is now the Global South. The offer in question, how- ever, only connects users to a small number of sites preselected by Facebook and excluding its main competitors such as Google. Internet.org aims to make these millions of potential internet users a captive clientele for Facebook and to offer the company a privileged position in emerging markets.

From this brief presentation, it is clear that the internet oli- gopoly directly controls the strategic markets for operating systems, data centres and, to a lesser extent, IT equipment and telecommunications networks. This vertical integration gives the oligopolistic players a privileged position enabling them to dominate the online services segment and the software seg- ment in direct contact with internet users.

THE HORIZONTAL CONCENTRATION OF THE INTERNET

Horizontal concentration is defined as bringing together under the same decision-making authority companies that

96 Internet Oligopoly

produce substitutable goods or services, that is, performing a comparable function for the end user. With these goods, a variation in consuming one can be compensated by an inverse variation in consumption of the other, which makes them interchangeable and competing. With the internet, what can be considered as ‘substitutable’ are all services and software that provide interpersonal and intergroup communication or access to content and information, and the combinations of these two general functions.

Communication and Networking Services

The three most common types of services currently available for interpersonal or intergroup communication are e-mail, instant messaging and social networking. In these three mar- ket segments, the internet oligopoly dominates. The e-mail market is shared among Apple, Google and Microsoft. Combining the use of all forms of such services (webmail, cli- ents for mobile devices and computers), these three companies have a market share of 85% (49% for Apple, 24% for Google and 12% for Microsoft).41 After a long period in which computer chat software dominated, notably MSN Messenger from Microsoft, the most strategic instant messa- ging segment has moved to mobile media. It is now controlled largely by Facebook and its two flagship applications Messenger (700 million active monthly users in 2015) and WhatsApp (900 million). The latter was bought in February 2014 for h 19 billion, although this start-up only had 55 employees at the time. Indeed, instant messaging has become a central function of smartphones, which is why Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 to merge it with MSN Messenger. Skype is now the fifth most popular instant messaging appli- cation with 300 million active monthly users, behind

97Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

Facebook and QQ and WeChat, belonging to the Chinese giant Tencent.

Facebook also dominates the social networking market. Its eponymous service is the most popular in the world with more than two billion monthly users active in 2017, followed by Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012. Instagram is sur- passed only by the Chinese Qzone (owned by Tencent) and is ahead of Twitter and Snapchat. Since the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft in June 2016 for $ 26 billion, Twitter and Snapchat are the only global social networking sites owned by companies that do not belong to the internet oligopoly.

Access to Information and Online Content

Access to information and online content is first provided by search engines. In this field, Google reigns alone with a global market share of over 70%, exceeding 90% in Europe. Its main competitors are Microsoft with Bing and Yahoo!, but together they do not account for more than 20% of global market share. Google also dominates the online video market with more than one billion users and three trillion views in 2015 for YouTube. The main challenger in this market is Facebook with two trillion views, with smaller players like Dailymotion and Vimeo far behind.42 This market is strategic because it corresponds to one of the most dynamic advertising segments online.

In news, Google and Facebook are the two largest provi- ders of traffic for news sites totalling more than 75% of the average incoming traffic in the United States.43 They have thus become indispensable to the media, which are obliged to comply with their economic requirements and technical regu- lations.44 In fact, since the beginnings of networked computing in the 1980s, news has been one of the essential components of

98 Internet Oligopoly

online consumer services. The advent of the web reinforced this trend but changed the balance of power: in the early 2000s, Google was able to impose its law on newspaper pub- lishers thanks to the dominance of its search engine, which at the time seemed to be a way to access online content without competition.

Nevertheless, the rise of the mobile internet has changed this situation. Now more than ever, the work of professional journalists draws a major audience. But alongside Google, a small number of players have arrived who control the major- ity of content distribution channels on mobile media. Apple, Twitter, Snapchat and especially Facebook are now the main news infomediaries on the mobile internet along with Google. That is why, in recent months, we have seen a fervent race in developing technical solutions to make it faster and easier to read news content on smartphones.45 This new configuration gives publishers a wider choice of distribution channels and rekindles the competition over infomediation platforms. But at the same time, it reinforces the oligopolistic dynamics of the mobile internet, where the concentration of audience and uses is much stronger than on the web.

Paid Downloads and Streaming

The market in paid downloads for audio!visual content is dominated by Apple with iTunes, Amazon and Google Play. These three platforms have the largest catalogues and the lar- gest number of users and downloads. In 2015, iTunes offered 28 million pieces of music (compared to 20 million for Amazon), 45,000 feature films, (compared with 52,000 for Amazon) and 85,000 TV episodes. Apple dominates online music purchases totalling 52% sales in 2015 compared to 19% for Amazon and 11% for Google, the rest being shared

99Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

among smaller players.46 The three giants have recently entered the streaming music market (Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music and Google Play) to compete with world leader Spotify, which has more than 70 million users in part thanks to an exclusive and contested partnership with Facebook.47

Finally, the e-book market is largely dominated by Amazon, which captures three-quarters of all sales by imposing a com- pletely integrated distribution system on users:48 its Kindle reader only recognises the proprietary AZW format, which is only available on Amazon’s platform. This integration allows Amazon to have a captive clientele and negotiate with pub- lishers from a position of strength. The only independent player of global scope to compete with Amazon in this market, alongside Apple (iBooks) and Google Play, is the Canadian company Kobo.49

In each of these sectors, the oligopoly actors have access to gigantic reservoirs of consumers and often very favourable agreements with producers and content publishers. They are therefore in a position to organise these markets according to their own interests, as well as to consolidate the position of the most powerful players in the culture and communication industries with whom they forge privileged partnerships.50

Therefore, contrary to the discourse of its representatives, the internet oligopoly works less in favour of diversity and plural- ism than it does in commodifying and industrialising online culture and information, as well as strengthening financial control over the internet.

NOTES

1. Smyrnaios, Nikos; Rebillard, Franck, “Entre coopération et concurrence : Les relations entre infomédiaires et éditeurs de contenus d’actualité”, Concurrences, n° 3, 2011, pp. 7!18.

100 Internet Oligopoly

2. For example, “Platform Studies” is a book series from The MIT

Press edited by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort that “investigates the

relationships between the hardware and software design of

computing systems and the creative works produced on those

systems”. Source: http://platformstudies.com/

3. Winseck, Dwayne, “Reconstructing the Political Economy of

Communication for the Digital Media Age”, The Political Economy

of Communication, vol. 4, n° 2, 2016, pp. 73!114

4. Plantin, Jean-Christophe; Lagoze Carl, Edwards, Paul N.;

Sandvig, Christian, “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in

the Age of Google and Facebook”, New Media & Society, August,

2016 (online first).

5. Gillespie, Tarleton, “The politics of ‘platforms’”, New Media &

Society, Volume 12, Issue 3, May 2010, p. 353.

6. Plantin et al., op. cit., p. 14.

7. Helmond, Anne, “The platformization of the web: Making web

data platform ready”, Social Media + Society 1(2), 2015, pp. 1!11.

8. Rieder, Sire, op. cit. p. 6.

9. Poell Thomas, Nieborg David, Brooke Erin Duffy, Prey Robert,

Cunningham Stuart, “The Platformization of Cultural Production”,

Selected Papers of #AoIR2017 - The 18th Annual Conference of

Internet Researchers, p. 14.

10. Nixon Brice, “Critical Political Economy of Communication and

the Problem of Method”, in Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco

(ed.), Marx and the Political Economy of the Media, Leiden, Brill,

2015.

11. Srnicek, Nick, Platform Capitalism, Cambridge, Polity, 2016.

12. Calabrese, Andrew, “Toward a Political Economy of Culture” in

Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks (ed.), Toward a Political

Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-

First Century, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

101Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

13. Nechushtai, Efrat, “Could digital platforms capture the media

through infrastructure ?”, Journalism, August 2017 (online first).

14. Valaskakis used the term Informediation. For a complete history

of this term, see Rebillard, Franck, George, Eric, Goyette-Côté,

Marc-Olivier, Smyrnaios, Nikos, Enjeux socio-économiques de la

diffusion d’informations d’actualité sur l’internet. Les relations entre

industries de la communication et éditeurs de presse, Research report

for the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication,

October 2011, available at http://smyrnaios.free.fr/Rapport_

infomediation.pdf

15. Valaskakis, Kimon, “Informediation” and the quality of life. A

conceptual framework for the assessment of the human implication

of the information revolution, Montréal, Gamma, 1982, p. 27.

16. Tarapannof, Kira, “Infomediary”, Bibliotecon, vol. 14, n 2,

1985, p. 349!350.

17. [translated here]. Cutajar, Marie, Les courtiers en information,

Thesis in information science, Université Lumière-Lyon II, 1997,

p. 139.

18. [translated here] Moeglin, Pierre, “Des modèles socio-

économiques en mutation” in Bouquillion, Philippe, Combes,

Yolande (eds.), Les industries de la culture et de la communication en

mutation, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007, p. 158.

19. Perticoz, Lucien, “Les industries culturelles en mutation : des

modèles en question”, Revue française des sciences de l’information

et de la communication, 1, 2012, http://rfsic.revues.org/112

20. Hagel, John III; Rayport, Jeffrey F., “The Coming Battle for

Customer Information”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 75, n° 1,

1997, pp. 53!65.

21. Brousseau, Eric, “e-Economie: Qu’y a-t-il de nouveau?”,

Annuaire des Relations Internationales, Bruxelles, Emile Bruylant,

2001, pp. 813!833.

102 Internet Oligopoly

22. Belleflame, Paul; Neysen, Nicolas, “Coopetition in

infomediation: General analysis and application to e-tourism”, in

Matias, Álvaro, Nijkamp, Peter, Sarmento, Manuela (dir.), Advances

in Tourism Economics, London, Springer, 2009, pp. 217!234.

23. For example, see Rebillard, Franck; Smyrnaios, Nikos, “Les

infomédiaires au cœur de la filière de l’information en ligne. Les cas

de Google, Wikio et Paperblog”, Réseaux, n° 160!161, 2010,

pp. 163!194 ; Smyrnaios, Nikos; Rieder, Bernhard, “Social

infomediation of news on Twitter: A French case study”, Necsus, the

European Journal of Media Studies, 2(2), 2013, pp. 359!381.

24. Srnicek, Nick, Platform Capitalism, op. cit., p. 44.

25. [translated here]. Cardon, Dominique, “Dans l’esprit du

PageRank. Une enquête sur l’algorithme de Google”, Réseaux,

n° 177, 2013, pp. 63!95.

26. [translated here] Cardon Dominique op. cit.

27. Bucher, Taina, “Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and

the threat of invisibility on Facebook”, New Media & Society,

vol. 14 no. 7, 2012, pp. 1164!1180

28. Guyot, Fernand, Eléments de microéconomie, Paris, Editions

Technip, 1986.

29. Wilhelm, Alex, “PC Market Slips 11.8 Percent In Q2 But Apple

Keeps Picking Up Steam”, TechCrunch, 9 July 2005.

30. comScore Reports July 2015 U.S. Smartphone Subscriber

Market Share, 3 September 2015.

31. IDC, “Worldwide Tablet Market Continues to Decline; Vendor

Landscape is Evolving,” Press release, 29 July 2015.

32. Waltz, Emilie, “How I quantified myself”, Spectrum, IEEE,

vol. 49, 2012, pp. 42!47.

33. Eadicicco, Lisa, “Amazon Reveals New Details About Drone

Deliveries”, Time, 19 January 2016.

103Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies

34. Unless indicated otherwise, the market shares given are found in

the database Net Applications and are from the month of November

2015. Source: https://www.netmarketshare.com/

35. Mosco, Vincent, To the Cloud. Big Data in a Turbulent World,

London, Paradigm Publishers, 2014.

36. Anthony, Sebastian, “Microsoft now has one million servers !

less than Google, but more than Amazon, says Ballmer”,

ExtremeTech, 19 July 2013.

37. Source: Microsoft Press Release, 26 May 2016.

38. https://fi.google.com/about/

39. https://internet.org/

40. Murthy, Mahesh, “Facebook’s new internet.org is evil”,

Techinasia, 15 November 2015.

41. Reference data from the company Litmus for November 2015.

Source: https://litmus.com/blog/top-10-most-popular-email-clients-

of-2015

42. Cohen, David, “Facebook Carving Niche vs. Dominant

YouTube”, Social Times, 23 June 2015.

43. Traffic other than direct access. Source: Parse.ly

44. Smyrnaios, Nikos, “Google and the algorithmic infomediation

of news”, Media Fields Journal, Issue 10, November 2015 (online),

http://mediafieldsjournal.squarespace.com/google-algorithmic-

infomedia/

45. Bell, Emily, “Legacy media diverge from digital natives in fight

against Facebook and Google”, Columbia Journalism Review, 11

July 2017.

46. Crupnick, Russ, “One Third of US Consumers Still Buy Music

Downloads, Even as Streaming Gains Momentum”, Music Watch,

9 April 2015.

104 Internet Oligopoly

47. Protalinski, Emil, “Spotify defends new Facebook requirement”,

ZDNet, 27 September 2011.

48. Loebbecke, Claudia; Soehnel, Anne; Weniger, Sandra; Weiss,

Thomas, “Innovating for the Mobile End-User Market: Amazon’s

Kindle 2 Strategy as Emerging Business Model”, Ninth International

Conference on Mobile Business Proceedings, June 2010.

49. “Apple, B&N, Kobo, and Google: a look at the rest of the ebook

market”, Author Earnings, October 2015.

50. See an example for the French press: Smyrnaios, Nikos,

“Google’s deal with the French press: a major event for the future of

news”, 25 February 2013, InaGlobal.

105Oligopoly’s Integration and Infomediation Strategies