Media ownership and concentration has major implications for politics, business, culture, regulation, and innovation. It is also a highly contentious subject of public debate in many countries around the world. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi's companies have dominated Italian politics. Televisa has been accused of taking cash for positive coverage of politicians in Mexico. Even in tiny Iceland, the regulation of media concentration led to that country's first and only public referendum. Who Owns the World's Media? moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. Based on an extensive data collection effort from scholars around the world, the book covers thirteen media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, wireless telecommunication and others, across a ten to twenty-five year period in thirty countries. In many countries--like Egypt, China, or Russia--little to no data exists and the publication of these chapters will become authoritative resources on the subject in those regions. After examining each country, Noam and his collaborators offer comparisons and analysis across industries, regions, and development levels. They also calculate overall national concentration trends beyond specific media industries, the market share of individual companies in the overall national media sector, and the size and trends of transnational companies in overall global media. This definitive global study of the extent and impact of media concentration will be an invaluable resource for communications, public policy, law, and business scholars in doing research and also for media, telecom, and IT companies and financial institutions in the private sector.

"Australia's telecommunications policy has hit an impasse. Government attempted to turn a monopoly into a competitive market with multiple players. A decade later, the result has been underinvestment and services which are falling behind other countries. This book explains how and why that has occurred. A flawed regulatory regime has distorted prices, deterred investment and privileged rent-seeking over genuine competition. The ACCC's administration of that regime has made matters worse, setting access charges below cost while extending the reach of regulation far beyond any reasonable bounds. As investment and innovation have stalled, government, rather than reforming the regulatory arrangements, has staggered from one poorly conceived half-measure to the next. In the process, billions of dollars of taxpayers' money have been spent, with much of that money wasted."--Provided by publisher.

Ithiel de Sola Pool was a pioneering social scientist, a distinguished scholar of the political process, and one of the most original thinkers in the development of the social sciences. Passionately engaged in politics, he continued his role of leadership throughout his life, building the MIT Political Science Department into an outstanding group. He organized international teams of social scientists and collaborated widely to develop the understanding of social change. He was a frequent adviser to governments as consultant and in-house critic, and a successful advocate of limits on government regulation. Politics in Wired Nations presents his writings on the social and political impact of different communication systems and new telecommunications technology. Included in this volume is the first study of trends in a global information society, and the first study of social networks and the "small world" phenomenon that creates new relationships and routes of informal influence and political power, both domestic and international. Pool's essays on the politics of foreign trade, the influence of American businessmen on Congress, and changeable "unnatural" institutions of the modern world (e.g., bureaucracies, mega-cities, and nation-states) are herein contained. Pool describes a nonviolent revolution in freedom and political control that is possible as the world changes from the era of one-way mass communications--targeted to national audiences--to a new era of abundant, high-capacity, low-cost, interactive, and user-controlled communications on a global scale. He discusses policy choices for freedom, the battlegrounds ahead, and the risks of government involvement in the regulation of new telecommunication technologies.