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Susan P. Crawford

Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age Paperback – February 25, 2014

by Susan Crawford (Author)

3.9 235 ratings

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Why Americans are paying much more for Internet access,and getting much less

Ten years ago, the United States stood at the forefront of the Internet revolution. With some of the fastest speeds and lowest prices in the world for high-speed Internet access, the nation was poised to be the global leader in the new knowledge-based economy. Today that global competitive advantage has all but vanished because of a series of government decisions and resulting monopolies that have allowed dozens of countries, including Japan and South Korea, to pass us in both speed and price of broadband. This steady slide backward not only deprives consumers of vital services needed in a competitive employment and business market—it also threatens the economic future of the nation.

This important book by leading telecommunications policy expert Susan Crawford explores why Americans are now paying much more but getting much less when it comes to high-speed Internet access. Using the 2011 merger between Comcast and NBC Universal as a lens, Crawford examines how we have created the biggest monopoly since the breakup of Standard Oil a century ago. In the clearest terms, this book explores how telecommunications monopolies have affected the daily lives of consumers and America's global economic standing.

Print length

368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Yale University Press
Publication date

February 25, 2014
Dimensions

6.25 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

0300205708
ISBN-13

978-0300205701
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Editorial Reviews

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""Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age" . . . offers a calm but chilling state-of-play on the information age in the United States. . . If you are looking for the answer to why much of the developed world has cheap, reliable connections to the Internet while America seems just one step ahead of the dial-up era, her office--or her book--would be a good place to find out."--David Carr, "The New York Times"
--David Carr "The New York Times "

"With an appealing blend of earnestness and feistiness, Crawford is set on turning the sorry state of broadband and wireless services in the United States into the biggest populist outrage since Elizabeth Warren went after banks." --John B./i>
--John B. Judis "The New Republic "

"Federal regulatory agencies make definitional decisions in the lives of Americans. But they are little covered by our diminished media; and even when the stories are told, they tend to be told from the perspective of the powerful. That's what makes Susan Crawford's book ". . . "so remarkable. She gets the facts straight--I know, because I was there. But she also does something just as important: she puts the facts in perspective, providing readers with an analysis that is essential if we are ever going to forge
communications policies that serve all Americans." --Micheal J./i>

--Michael J. Copps"The Nation" (04/12/2013)

"Important and provocative." --Sam Gustin, "Time.com"--Sam Gustin "Time.com "

"Crawford shows us that the railroad barons of today run cable companies. These monopolies raise prices, stifle competition, and drag the U.S. further behind in global telecommunications revolution."--Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations"--Clay Shirky (03/23/2012)

About the Author

Susan Crawford is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She lives in New York City.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; Reprint edition (February 25, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300205708
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300205701
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.02 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,028,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #208 in Public Administration
- #610 in Media & Communications Industry (Books)
- #6,479 in Communication Skills

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3.9 235 ratings

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3.9 out of 5

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Stephen P. Percoco

Very Good History and Review of Telecommunications Industry

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

Susan Crawford provides an excellent description of the development of the telecommunications sector and the major players and events that have shaped it. She is critical of the high speed internet services now offered in the U.S., saying that they are not as good as those in other countries (e.g. Korea, Japan, parts of Europe) and blames the oligopoly power of the service providers (Comcast, AT&T and Verizon). She believes that the industry needs to be regulated. While much of her criticism is valid, it is clearly biased in favor of the user of the services and does not give much credence to the rights (or rather the obligations) of the providers to maximize their investment returns. Her arguments need to be revisited in light of coming technological advances (e.g. 5G). She also does not seem to consider the possibility of cooperation between the service providers and the communities that they serve. (For example, municipalities that want the highest quality high speed internet services could pay the service providers to upgrade their networks in exchange for a guaranteed (low) monthly user fee for a specified period of time.) Despite my disagreements with some of her conclusions, Prof. Crawford does provide a very good history and review of the telecommunications industry and raises many issues that are worth considering (and maybe acting upon). I learned a lot from reading her book.

One person found this helpful

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A. Hartung

Enlightening Eye-Opener, if a little heavy on the message.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

I just bought a 2nd copy for my dad. So here's a couple things that struck a cord with me in this book: USA is someplace between 24th and 37th in the world right now for internet speeds depending on which reputable, independent study you read. (Just Google US internet speeds and look for studies hosted on legitimate, respected academic or industry recognized websites. Be wary of telco lobbyist efforts AKA astro-turfing by "activist" organizations with names like NetCompetition, Broadband For America, and Media Freedom. They just praise the telcos and add nothing to the discussion. Recently in the last 2 years progress towards faster internet speeds here in the US has actually degenerated backwards. Let me explain. If you walk into an internet cafe in Tijuana, Mexico you will pay a metered rate for kb, Gb, or however much internet you use just like the "new" model adopted by Verizon, Time Warner, and the rest of the cartel/oligarchy. Most post-industrial, first world countries use flat rates. Metering would be acceptable if bandwidth was a legitimate scarcity, like crude oil, or silver. But the fact is we humans can make as much of it as we want. There really is no limit. Just greedy telcos worried about what the shareholders will say or do if they re-invest too much back into infrastructure. The most egregious part of it all in my opinion is the "dark fiber". You see, back during the dot.com bubble we saw explosive growth in internet-based online commerce and fiber optic communications backbones (cables) were laid all over the nation. Then when the bubble popped they just left it there. Dark. This dark fiber is mostly what Google is buying up and lighting up as part of their Google Fiber internet offering in a few cities. Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T executives don't think we need gigabit speeds to the home. Or even 100 megabit speeds. They are telling us what we need. They are telling us that's too fast for America. By the way, current high definition 1080p quality TV is only available from a bluray disk player plugged into the TV because no home internet connection in America (with exception of the 2% of households on Google Fiber, Verizon Fios, or some other experimental market) can stream lossless 1080p. Right this second Sony, Samsung, and Seiki are selling 4K definition TVs right here on Amazon. That's right. 4000 vertical lines instead of 1080. When do you think your internet provider will allow you to stream 4K content from Hulu, Netflix, Vudu, iTunes, AmazonPrime, Playstation Network, or Microsoft Live without stuttering and timing out? 2050? "Our customers don't want it." one executive was quoted as saying. He's probably right from the perspective of what they are charging for the top tier of service. Compare any ISP rates to Google Fiber rates, I dare you. Anyways, that's just some of the top things come to mind from the book. It's a decent book. In my opinion, if people want to pretend broadband is a scarcity, then our lawmakers should legislate it like a scarcity. Just like low-flow/low-flush water fixtures, electrical appliances with the "green star" rating, and "zero emissions" manufacturer vehicle quotas; there should be Federal regulations governing minimum acceptable internet speeds in this country that are increased every year at a predetermined, predictable rate. Shareholders of the cartels can't cry or feign indignation about it because they knew it was coming, and every one of their competitors must also tow the line to bring us out of 3rd world internet speeds. Also I agree with the author, nobody can claim its a free market when all I can subscribe to is Time Warner because they have agreements in place with Cox to stay out of each others territory, and Verizon Wireless is selling cable television services from Time Warner and buying broadband spectrum from them too.
Let's fix our crap internet speeds America.

24 people found this helpful

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A Private Pilot

A Timely, Important Book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 8, 2013

Verified Purchase

Captive Audience calls much-needed attention to telecom market consolidation, merging of carriage and content, and anticompetitive carrier tactics resulting in growing limitations on the relative speed, utility, and affordability of American consumer broadband Internet access. These issues have concerned me for some time. (For the record: I am a graduate-degreed scientist and a former network manager at a major university, but I am not employed by the telecom industry or its critics, directly or indirectly.) Ms. Crawford writes very well and makes a persuasive case which, to her credit, is accessible to a broad audience; any interested reader will find food for serious thought in her book. Still, Captive Audience is necessarily somewhat technical, part scholarly treatise and part case study, because the risks to the public interest and American global competitiveness which Crawford identifies are relatively simple, while minimizing them requires an understanding of technological, legal, and governmental regulatory history which is anything but.

Ironically, the reaction to Captive Audience has been almost as enlightening as the book itself. It is sad but not surprising to see among many strongly positive reviews here a number of 1- and 2-star reviews from conservative pseudo-academics, political pundits, and would-be policy wonks who have tried to refute Crawford's conclusions with straw-man arguments, "evidence" frequently drawn from their own paid opinions rather than from original sources of independent data, and tired absolutist free-market philosophies which opponents of regulation in any form have flogged since the original Gilded Age in the 19th century. A quick Internet search reveals that the authors of every one of these negative reviews are transparently shilling for the American telecom industry as paid PR flacks, marketing consultants, or employees of telecom industry-funded think tanks.

A newer spate of negative reviews takes what appears to be a more subtle but no less misleading tack: We are now supposed to believe that a range of everyday Americans who have never before reviewed any other book on Amazon.com have also given Captive Audience 1- or 2-star reviews, all in a one-week period, all because they deny its broadly-supported conclusions on the basis of homey personal anecdotes. One completely misses Crawford's fundamental point that in contrast to a growing number of other technologically advanced countries, the blazing fast fiber broadband which he apparently enjoys at work remains unavailable at any price to the vast majority of American homes. Another apparently travels between different cities--does he subscribe to residential broadband access anywhere?--and seems not to realize that the particular wireless applications he finds useful do not generally require high data throughput so they are poor measures of broadband Internet speed and cost for other users. Another uses high-bandwidth applications in an unspecified rural location and assures us that the broadband access speeds available to him are adequate for his needs, but offers no evidence that the same is true for other rural areas or that similar speeds will continue to be adequate for even higher-bandwidth applications of the near future. Yet another curiously mixes basic errors in grammar with rhetorical flourishes, as if he has been fed professionally-written sound bites to offer as his own opinions, wittingly or unwittingly.

I do not find it plausible that these negative reviews represent truly independent opinions; it appears that most or all have been carefully guided by the unseen hand of the American telecom industry's pervasive and very well-funded lobbying machine. For that reason, they backfire: they ultimately fail to refute Crawford's thesis, but taken together, they are a ringing endorsement of the need for her timely book. The fact that the major telecom carriers appear to be so afraid of Captive Audience, are too craven to address Crawford's concerns directly and honestly, and instead feel they need to use third parties and straw-man tactics to try to discredit her conclusions and make other people afraid of them, is the most compelling reason for all concerned Americans to read Captive Audience and decide for themselves.

25 people found this helpful

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Amazonのお客様

First Amendmentの今日的応用

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on January 2, 2015

Verified Purchase

NBCU/Comcastの判断に批判的な立場の代表的な議論に、深く触れられる良作。個々の表現の自由を厳格に確保することと、反トラスト法の適用とはとても適合的な訳ですが、それだけでは済まなくなって来たのか否か。そこを考えさせる本です。

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