Query: Internet oligopolies and power

title: Oligopolies of the past? Habermas, Bourdieu, and conceptual approaches to news agencies
abstract: This article uses the history of news agencies, particularly in Germany, to explore key theories about media transitions. First, many over emphasize technology as an autonomous factor divorced from politics, economics, and culture. Historical methodologies remind us that technology is socially constructed, as I show using the example of wireless technology. Second, the economic dominance of platforms has become central to the debate about how to reform the Internet. This too draws on long standing conceptual approaches to media, pioneered by Habermas. Like online platforms, news agencies were bottlenecks for news; their history reminds us that their dominance stemmed from politics as much as economics. Finally, I suggest that we need to include Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic power and institutions to understand why certain media firms became so central. To understand news agencies, we can thus combine the work of Habermas and Bourdieu with theories about the social construction of technology to retrace the interaction between politics, economics, technology, and social norms that imbued news agencies with such power for so long.

title: Networked Society and its New Power Actors: Critical Analysis of Hardware, Software, and Communicative Level of Digital Space
abstract: The paper analyses the networked society with the use of critical Internet studies approach. The authors consider the expansion of digital space as a transformational factor of post modern individual work. In particular, there are negative trends: the decline in productivity, the decline in leisure quality and the problem of digital exploitation. The latest trend is considered using such concepts as "digital prosumerism" "digital labor product" and "digital capital" The authors note that capital in the digital space consists of two components: market and communicative ones. Both of these components play an important role in the spread of digital branding and in the formation of digital power actors at three levels of the digital space: communicative (digital profi sumers) software (platforms as traffic oligopolies) and hardware (digital architects) The paper deals with the problems that may arise due to the strengthening of these actors. The authors propose approaches and possible tools (including Big Data analyses and math modelling) for empirical verification of the concepts applied.

title: Hollywood versus the Internet: the media and entertainment industries in a digital and networked economy
abstract: The behaviour of oligopolistic firms is a source of considerable debate and concern, given their market power and ability to shape the development of new markets. A key area of debate concerns the scope for strategic adaptation in oligopolies; and in particular, the extent to which such large and otherwise successful firms ignore or marginalize important shifts in the marketplace. In this article, I critically evaluate these general theoretical issues through the lens of a specific, geographically bounded case study: the collision between Hollywood, a mature oligopoly comprising six studios, and the Internet, a decentralized architecture that has made possible peer to peer (P2P) file sharing between networked computers. I argue that in a secure form (enforced by 'digital rights management' software) file sharing has considerable promise for all copyright owners, including the studios. I examine the oligopolistic behaviour of the studios in response to the Internet, and in particular, their response to an alternative mode of peer based film distribution, oriented around legal, paid for file sharing. I argue that the studios are trying to preserve the oligopolistic structure of the industry in a digital age by promoting an inefficient and restrictive 'design' for Internet distribution, oriented around centralized server client architectures, which provides tight control over digital commodities and minimizes the disruptive impact of the Internet. This behaviour must be understood in light of the social and economic incentives that influence executives, as well as the context in which decision making takes place. Nonetheless, their response also raises some worrying questions about the future shape of creativity, distribution and consumption in the film industry (and in the broader realm of media and entertainment) in a digital and networked economy. The article is based on over 150 interviews with elites in the studios and other related firms in the Los Angeles region.

title: Law, Society and Digital Platforms: Normative Aspects of Large scale Data Driven Tech Companies
abstract: It is increasingly apparent that technology and online platforms entail and communicate normativity. Lawrence Lessig has described this in terms of 'code as law' and thereby pointing to the fact that there is an ongoing shift of power from nation states to tech companies, and Jose van Dijck has shown how the Big Five Google (Alphabet) Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft represents a neo liberal American value system. Further, platforms penetrate every sector (governmental, private, non profit etc. of society, and at the same time, through ownership and partnership, they progressively are growing into strong oligopolies. Examples are the urban transport sector, news, health, education and job matching. The sector specific platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, MyFitnessPal, Udemy or LinkedIn are almost always dependent on or allied with one of the big five.The digital platforms operate through what media researcher Jonas Andersson Schwarz has called a platform "logic" that is, including being internet based, highly data driven, large scale and algorithmically automated and serving a business model. The larger ones takes on an infrastructural character on a macro level, as a platforms based "superstructures" or "ecologies" platforms of platforms. This gatekeeping character is combined with the essence of exercising its dominance through a "code based control" leads to that they in fact becomes "lawmakers" in a non governmental sense, which needs further socio legal scrutiny from a number of perspectives.This paper focuses the normative 'lawmaking' aspects of large scale platforms. By clearly acknowledging the distribution of norms by large platforms we emphasize the need to critically assess and re conceptualize how these are designed into these platforms and what it means for the national state as normative source. The paper thereby addresses the "algorithmic accountability" that increasingly are called for, debating how to study and understand accountability for automated services, as well as the lack of transparency the platforms often bring in terms of normative decision making.

title: Inclusion or expulsion: Digital technologies and the new power relations in China's "Internet finance"
abstract: The financial sector in China is well known as a government dominated hierarchy, and the access to financial services has been controlled primarily by the state run banks. Fin tech businesses, or so called "Internet finance," in China have included new actors such as Internet companies, small and medium enterprises, and small lay investors in the financial regime. The new entrants' technology mediated interactions with the government engendered new politico economic relations within and beyond the market, in the cyberspace and in everyday life. How have the Chinese modes of financial inclusion reconfigured the power relations between the state, corporations, and the investing public in China? Through the political economic analyses of three specific forms of fin tech businesses third party payment, peer to peer lending, and money market fund this article argues that Chinese fin techs have enabled a broader societal participation to investment practices and empowered Internet corporations alongside the state controlled financial systems. Thus, such an inclusion is less about the "inclusive finance" endorsed by the World Bank for the under represented social groups' accesses to financial services. It is more of a technology facilitated financialization initiated by the state, promoted by information technology companies, and popularized among small investors. Rather than leading to the decentralization of financial power, China's fin tech has formed a higher level of concentration of financial capital controlled by the Chinese oligopoly Internet corporations. Moreover, the collaborations and competitions between the growing fin tech companies and the state owned financial sector deserve further observations.

title: Multimedia Upstreaming Cournot Game in Non Orthogonal Multiple Access Internet of Things
abstract: With the rapid growth of multimedia content production from massive User Equipments (UEs) in the Internet of Things (IoTs) environment, how to ensure high Quality of Experience (QoE) for UEs in the wireless IoT upstreaming services becomes a big challenge. To address the multimedia IoT QoE challenge, a game theoretical power allocation strategy is studied in the Non Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) wireless uplink IoT environment in this paper. Due to the natural non cooperative relationships among UEs, we model the UEs' power allocation problem in the upstreaming service as a Cournot competition game in an Oligopoly market model. In addition, factors such as the uploading content popularity, power constraints, and the energy cost of a UE are jointly considered when we build UE's QoE model. By deriving the concavity of UE's utility function, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium power solution for each UE. Numerical simulations are carried out by considering all the system constraints in the multiple UEs scenarios. The results show that system throughput in the NOMA scheme outperforms the conventional Orthogonal Multiple Access, and the system utility performance in the proposed game solution is better than the fixed power selection strategy.

title: New perspectives on internet electricity use in 2030
abstract: The main problems with several existing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) power footprint investigations are: too limited (geographical and temporal) system boundary, overestimation of power saving potential in the next decade, assume that historical power use can predict future global power use in the next decade despite unprecedented data traffic growth, assume that Mooret's law relation to digital circuitry can continue "forever" and that no problems with extra cooling power will occur for several decades. The highly variable outlooks for the future power consumptions depend on "starting values" disruptions, regional differences and perceptual estimations of electricity intensity reductions and data traffic increase. A hugely optimistic scenario which takes into account 20% annual improvement of the J/bit in data centers and networks until 2030 is presented. However, the electric power consumption of the present ICT scope will be significant unless great efforts are put into power saving features enabling such improvements of J/bit. Despite evident risks, it seems though that planned power saving measures and innovation will be able to keep the electricity consumption of ICT and the World under some kind of control. The major conclusion is based on several simulations in the present study that future consumer ICT infrastructure cannot slow its overall electricity use until 2030 and it will use more than today. Data traffic may not be the best proxy metric for estimating computing electricity. Operations and J/operation seem more promising for forecasting and scaling of bottom up models.

title: Ultra Low Power Wake up Radio for 5G IoT
abstract: 5G Internet of Things (5G IoT) which is currently under development by 3GPP, paves the way for connecting diverse categories of devices to the IoT via cellular networks. For battery powered low cost IoT devices, wake up radio (WuR) appears as an eminent technique for prolonging the lifetime of such devices, thanks to its outstanding energy consumption performance. However, only some small size battery powered IoT devices are able to transmit to a cellular IoT base station (BS) directly. In this article, we present W2B IoT, a prototype implementation of a WuR based twotier system, which bridges cellular IoT BS and WuR via a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) enabled Android smartphone. Such a WuR enabled IoT device features a current consumption of merely 390 nA and a response time of 95 ms for decoding a wake up call.

title: Private Power and New Media: The Case of the Corporate Suppression of WikiLeaks and its Implications for the Exercise of Fundamental Rights on the Internet
abstract: The focus of this paper will be the recent conduct of various corporations in withdrawing Internet services provided to information portal WikiLeaks in light of the controversy surrounding WikiLeaks publishing classified documents of correspondence between the US State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world in late 201'3 The implications for freedom of expression (especially the right to access information) on the Internet will be examined in the wake of WikiLeaks, particularly in the context of the infringer being a private actor, and one comprising a mono or oligopoly. The motivation of these private actors in contributing to the suppression of WikiLeaks will be assessed to examine whether it constitutes an example of Birnhack and Elkin Koren's 'invisible handshake' i.e. the 'emerging collaboration' between the state and multinational corporations on the Internet that they posit is producing 'the ultimate threat' The legal recourse open to WikiLeaks and its users for the infringement of fundamental rights will be examined, especially the First Amendment to the US Constitution since the geographic location for these events has mostly been the USA. Finally, the postscript to the WikiLeaks controversy will be considered: the "information warfare" conducted by hackers will be examined to determine whether the exercise of power of these Internet corporations in a way which infringes fundamental rights can be checked by technological means, and whether hackers are indeed the true electronic defenders of freedom of expression.

title: A Smart Sensor Node for the Internet of Elevators Non Invasive Condition and Fault Monitoring
abstract: The signal processing scheme of a smart sensor node for the Internet of Elevators is presented. The sensor node is a self contained black box unit only requiring power to be supplied, which enables a cost efficient way to modernize existing elevator systems in terms of condition monitoring capabilities. The sensor node monitors the position of the elevator using an inertial navigation system in conjugation with a simultaneous localization and mapping framework. Features reflecting the elevator system's operation and health condition are calculated by evaluating the ride quality parameters defined by the ISO 18738 1 standards, the vibration versus frequency spectrum, and the vibration versus position spectrum. Abnormal stops are identified by detecting decelerations that deviate from the typical deceleration pattern of the elevator or when the stopping position of the elevator does not match the learned floor levels. Furthermore, the condition of the door system is monitored by tracking the magnetic field variations that the motion of the doors creates; the number of door openings and the time required for the doors to close are estimated. The capability and performance of the blacksignal processing scheme are illustrated through a series of experiments. The experiments show, inter alia, that using low cost sensors similar to those in a smartphone, the position of the elevator car can, with 99.9% probability, be estimated with an error of less than 1 m for travels up to 43 s long. The experiments also indicate that small degradations in the doors' closing time can be detected from the magnetic field measurements.