ABSTRACT
Remember all the giddy talk about the “information superhighway”? Well, it never got built—at least not the way Time Warner, Microsoft, and AT&T imagined it. As recently as 1993 the media Goliaths were spinning blue-sky fantasies about delivering five hundred cable channels and personalized pay-per services to your home, while collecting access tolls for the individual use of vast corporate libraries of information and entertainment product. The fantasies are still kicking around; unlike in 1993 when phone-cable mergers like Bell Atlantic-TCI were the model for interactive use, they are currently being traded between cable companies and software giants like Microsoft. Now that Microsoft has acquired WebTV along with the cable operator Comcast in June 1997, its hopes are pinned on consolidating high-speed Internet access via cable as the pipeline for vertical and horizontal integration of all entertainment and information services. Whether this strategy will prove any more financially viable than the earlier attempt at media convergence, there’s no doubt that those revisions of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 and the Telecom Competition and Deregulation Act of 1995 that facilitate multimedia corporate mergers have laid the legal groundwork. Our hard-earned paranoia about the growth of monopolies in the world of old media has prepared us for the worst. Yet, as in all matters related to New Media, it seems as if the theory has preceded the practice. Everyone thinks they know what is supposed to happen … but it always hasn’t happened yet.
