[Air-L] New book on the Internet Oligopoly (in French)

[Nikos]

(Apologies for Crossposting)


Dear colleagues,



I am happy to announce that my book on the Internet Oligopoly is out (published by INA éditions).



The title in French is:

Les GAFAM contre l'internet : Une économie politique du numérique



You can read a long excerpt on INA Global<http://www.inaglobal.fr/numerique/article/l-internet-libre-et-gratuit-c-est-bien-fini-9725>.



Here’s a resumé in English:



"Digital technologies multiply in our everyday lives. Ordinary sociability, work, entertainment, education: almost all of our social life is gradually colonized by digital devices, networks, and services which become useful but also invasive adjuvants. This process takes place in a globalized and deregulated economy that favours an extreme concentration of resources. In this context, a few start-ups, once sympathetic, gave birth to oligopolistic multinationals that govern the informational infrastructure of our societies.



The objective of this book is to contribute to the constitution of an analytical framework of the Internet under the lens of political economy. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM) are not examined as exceptional successes.  On the contrary, they are seen as emblematic products of a new capitalist order which they themselves contribute to forge, legitimize and strengthen. This neoliberal order is resolutely opposed to the original project of the Internet. The book describes precisely the process of commodification that allowed financial logic to penetrate the field of connected computing, originally conceived as a public good in the service of collective emancipation. It shows how, today, the oligopoly of the Internet uses it’s exorbitant market power to eliminate any potential or real competition. How it profits from financial globalization to exploit human labour on a global scale and to avoid taxation. How it implements strategies that enable it to control our daily communication tools and platforms that we use to access information and content online. The book takes a long look at the sophisticated devices used by the oligopoly to capture the value produced on-line by a multitude of users and non-market structures, including through a massive exploitation of data collected on Internet users. Ultimately, it shows that the future of the Internet cannot be thought of outside broader issues such as the place of work in the future society, social and economic inequalities and, ultimately, democracy".




Best regards.



Nikos Smyrnaios



Maître de conférences / Associate professor

Laboratoire d'Études et de Recherches Appliquées en Sciences Sociales

Université de Toulouse

0033 66 64 79 33 1

http://univ-toulouse.academia.edu/smyrnaios

http://ephemeron.eu