In Christian Sandvig’s chapter “The Internet as the Anti-Television: Distribution Infrastructure as Culture and Power” in Parks and Starosielski’s Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, I was struck by the presence, as several classmates have already mentioned, of the neoliberal powers that be behind the advent of video on the Internet. Courtney brought up Sandvig’s use of the term “corporate liberalism,” and I want to know: does anyone besides Sandvig use this? I like that its meaning is explicit (not so with neoliberalism). Can we make it big?

I found David’s discussion of the chapter in his blog helpful in sorting out my lingering concerns. In his blog, he writes, “And, while the conventional wisdom still holds that the content that users consume is driven by what users ultimately want, the fact remains that the network must overcome the issue that users’ requests really are not all that unique. There is much greater competition and contention for the same resources than had originally been envisioned.” What I’m left wondering is how much of the popular content on the Internet is put out by the same massive companies, beyond the near-monopoly Netflix has on Internet streaming? (Sandvig cites statistics that “during peak video watching times, two providers (Netflix and YouTube) accounted for more than half of all Internet data in 2013, not including peer-to-peer traffic. A recent study found that at peak television viewing hours 34 percent of North American wired broadband traffic went to just one source—Netflix” (237)).

I’m a little paranoid (to take a spin on Aden’s blog post) that even where there seems to be healthy competition, that might be an illusion. I’m thinking of how in the food distribution industry, Cisco and US Foods and Kraft own a multitude of smaller companies and private label lots of their products so that it appears that the consumer has the choice of many more brands than actually is the case. Similarly, in reading about the local farm movement in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I recall learning about Monsanto re-branding their seeds but in actuality owning everything offered in seed catalogues distributed to farmers year after year. And that’s not even getting into the issue of CDNs.