Many of the most powerful online media websites are owned by some of the largest media corporations in the world. Fox Interactive Media (News Corp) spent $580 million to acquire MySpace.com. Google, a large and more powerful media corporation, owns one of the most popular blog platforms: BlogSpot.com. Google also purchased Youtube, the most popular online video site on the Internet, for $1.65 billion. Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL Time Warner own other popular platforms. Google’s chief executive officer Eric Schmidt recently estimated that Google purchases start-up web companies every few days, and is quoted saying, “I think the pace [of Google buyouts] will accelerate”.
This level of power over the Internet, the most powerful medium the world has ever seen, begs the question: how are major web owners using these online properties? New commercial incursions by big online media enterprises including the widely disdained “Facebook Beacon”, make explicit what new media giants have been doing quietly for some time: searching for new and more effective ways to sell our attention, our clicks, and our private information to advertisers and marketers. The Facebook Beacon system monitored Facebook users activities on partnering websites and notified the users’ friends about purchases made. It’s not surprising that this both ruined a few Christmas surprises and outraged many when they realized the level of surveillance they were exposed to. Although Facebook recently bowed to public pressure and made this referral system only apply to those who opt in, it was also recently revealed that the beacon continues to monitor Facebook users activities on the web even if they are logged out of Facebook, regardless of if they opt in to the beacon service.
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