The rapid growth of the internet in China has been propelled by the Chinese government’s push to develop the country’s information infrastructure and its tight control over the internet. The most recent stage of internet development in China, however, has been driven by a three-way dynamic between the State, internet companies, and international finance capital. This relationship has yielded three internet giants—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—that stand at the apex of the internet economy in China. They also rival their US counterparts like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, on several key measures. We examine annual reports and other financial documents to better understand these three companies’ character as ‘capitalist enterprises’ and the tight nexus that links them to international investment banks, venture capital funds, and other foreign investors. While these processes are now fundamentally shaping ‘the Chinese internet’, they have not yet been adequately explored in the scholarly literature, we argue.

According to many observers, economic globalization and the liberalization of telecoms/internet policy have remade the world in the image of the United States. The dominant roles of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have also led to charges of US internet imperialism. This article, however, argues that while these internet giants dominate some of the most popular internet services, the ownership and control of core elements of the internet infrastructure—submarine cables, internet exchange points, autonomous system numbers, datacenters, and so on—are tilting increasingly toward the EU and BRICS (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries and the rest of the world, complicating views of hegemonic US control of the internet and what Susan Strange calls the knowledge structure.

New media have expanded the size of the media economy without cannibalizing the economic base of traditional media. The current woes facing some media primarily reflect a short-term, cyclical decline in advertising revenue caused by the economic downturn, the accumulated results of media consolidation, and the financialization of the media. The latter process saw vast sums of capital investment in the creation of massive media conglomerates based on wildly optimistic projections where future profits would grow faster than the expanding network media economy and exceed the high profits that characterized the media in the past. When that rosy scenario failed to materialize, some media companies were indeed in trouble and saddled with unsustainable debts, but there has been no crisis of the media per se.RÉSUMÉ  Les nouveaux médias ont agrandi l’économie des médias sans cannibaliser les bases économiques des médias traditionnels. Les problèmes actuels que confrontent certains de ces médias reflètent surtout un déclin à court terme des revenus publicitaires causé par la situation économique récente, les résultats cumulatifs de la fusion des médias, et la financialisation des médias. En ce qui a trait à ce dernier processus, on a recouru à de vastes mises de fonds pour créer des conglomérats médiatiques massifs en croyant avec unoptimisme excessif que les futurs profits augmenteraient plus vite que l’économie des réseaux médiatiques en expansion et excéderaient les profits importants déjà réalisés par les médias dans le passé. Quand les profits attendus ne sont pas arrivés, certaines compagnies médiatiques se sont retrouvées avec des dettes insurmontables, mais il n’y a pas eu de crise des médias en tant que telle.

This article presents a global overview of the state of communications media ownership and markets. The primary issue at stake is whether or not markets and ownership are becoming more or less concentrated. After reviewing contrasting views on this issue, I suggest that the question turns on whether or not we consider 'numerical diversity' (the number of channels available in any given area) versus 'source diversity' (a measure of the number of media owners in any given area). Drawing on recent data I suggest that while there is undoubtably greater 'numerical diversity', we are seeing -within countries, regionally and globallygreater concentration at the level of 'source diversity'. While new media, especially the Internet, open up unprecedented opportunities for people to access and distribute information, the emergence of a powerful nexus between both 'old' and 'new' media means that the character of media ownership and markets still matters greatly. This nexus of ownership and market power spans different segments of the media and is qualitatively different from previous times. These factors have an important influence on the evolution of media technologies and markets, the work of media professionals and the character of information and media content.A new journal needs to start out on a high note, addressing important issues in a timely and accessible way. Questions about media ownership and the state of media markets, within nations and worldwide, fit that bill. They are perennial issues, as well. In the past few years, and even as I write, Australia, Britain, Canada, Mexico and the USA, among many others, have relaxed their media ownership rules. Do, or will, these changes foster healthier competition, as advocates claim, or even more consolidation, as critics charge? What effect will they have on media content, media professionals, the evolution of media technologies and the role of communications media in society, democratic or otherwise? These questions are the core themes of this article.Several factors have propelled structural changes in communication and media markets, within countries and globally. These factors include the

In this introductory chapter, I want to set the scene for this book and to paint a broad portrait of a certain view of communication and media studies, and the role of different political economies of the media in the fi eld. Communication and media studies often labor under the illusion that political economy comes in one fl avor, but here I suggest that we can identify at least four perspectives that have considerable currency in the fi eld. They are (1) conservative and liberal neoclassical economics; (2) radical media political economy, with two main versions, the monopoly capital and digital capitalism schools; (3) Schumpeterian institutional political economy and two recent offshoots, the creative industries and network political economy schools; and lastly (4) the cultural industries school. Of course, neither all of this volume's authors nor communication and media studies as a fi eld can be placed so neatly in these categories, but other approaches can be thought of as derivatives of them (e.g. cultural economy, neo-Marxian political economy, critical cultural political economy, and economic geography). To begin, we need to clearly specify our "object of analysis." To that end, I focus on the "network media industries," a composite of the 10 largest media and internet industries, ranked by total worldwide revenues: television, internet access, newspapers, books, fi lms, magazines, music, radio, internet advertising, and video games. These industries do not exist all on their own but are surrounded by the "social ecology of information" and fl anked, on one side, by the telecoms industries and, on the other, by the information, communication, and technology (ICT) sector. I use the concept of the network media industries in a way that follows Yochai Benkler (2006). The construct refers to the core and emergent public communications media that migrate around various distribution networks and media platforms and devices. It is not convergence, per se, but a network of media tied together through strategies, capital investment, ownership, technologies, uses, alliances, rights regimes, and so on. Methodologically and empirically, the concept is an important tool because it establishes what is included and excluded from analysis. Perhaps, however, this is just another wave of "creative destruction" that happens every so often to wipe away the old, and usher in the new, as Joseph Schumpeter (1943/1996: 83) put it in his classic, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. This, I believe, would not adequately capture the essence of the situation either. There is scant evidence to support the view that traditional media are going the way of the dinosaur, although many of the media conglomerates cobbled together near the end of the twentieth century have since been restructured, dismantled, or fallen into fi nancial disarray, as Chapters 6 and 7 in this book show. For the most part, however, the traditional media are not in crisis. Among the top 10 internet companies worldwide, 3 are well-known media conglomerates, and a...