Penetration of our daily life by the Internet has made it
possible for us to form ideas different from that imposed
by mass media. I'm quite positive that the world has not
seen a situation like this before.
Conventional media have, understandably,tried their best
to stigmatize information conveyed and opinions expressed
online as unreliable in order to keep their position.
Until recently, they were in a position to and did in actual
fact convey information in a unilateral fashion and achieve
the manipulation of public opinion. This bare fact, that
is, their effort in stigmatization, I think, proves their
admission of the power of the Internet in the formation
of ideas.
Since diversity of opinions and ideas is an essential pre-
requisite for democracy, the great achievement of the Inter-
net mentioned above cannot be overestimated.
But I have some concerns about the Internet. Here, I will
touch on just one of them―Google. Google has, partly with
the help of aquisition, say, of Youtube,been growing at an
alarming rate. It has almost cornered the Internet adver-
tisement market and been invading the market of application
softs, where Microsoft has long been criticized, say, iron-
ically enough, by Google ,for monopoly(this is mainly because
it has been made possible for many application softs to
operate on brousers, making unavailable Microsofts' traditional
starategy of tie-in sales).
It is well known about "platform business" that once one company
has cornered the market, it becomes quite difficult, maybe almost
impossible, for others to challenge it. Just imagine you start
a new SNS and could challenge mixi.
The concentration of power in the hands of one company is,
considering together that it deals mainly with information,
horrible to think.
The situation might go back to the time when the Internet was not
available to us.
