I’m currently reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media” and have run across some great quotes which I thought I’d share.

“In regard to the critical issues of monopoly, free expression, and individual privacy, the advent of the telegraph posed new problems for which nineteenth century American thought and institutions were unprepared. Americans had typically conceived of monopoly as originating in political and legal privilege. They did not have established legal principles and policies for dealing with monopolies such as Western Union that emerged in the market and by the time that framework emerged during the Progressive era, the diffusion of the telephone was already eroding the telegraph’s monopoly position. Similarly, Americans had generally believed that the way to preserve freedom of the press was to protect the press from the federal government; their ideas and experience had not prepared them to deal with a private monopolist and a new medium of communication. As newspapers and other businesses came to depend on the telegraph, state and federal law at first offered them only limited protection against discrimination by Western Union. In 1894, the Supreme Court declared that telegraph companies were “bound to serve all customers alike, without discrimination,” but the Court refused to categorize the companies as “common carriers,” like railroads. It was only in 1910, in amendments to the Interstate Commerce Act, that Congress defined telegraph and telephone companies unambiguously as common carriers, required to accept messages from any customer willing and able to pay. American concerns about individual privacy, reflected in the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, had also focused on infringements by government, not by private corporation. Nineteenth-century law did not extend to the telegraph either the protection of individual privacy or the commitment to popular access to service that postal policy had provided.

In short, while Americans developed the telegraph early and fast, they did so without translating into a new technological context the underlying principles embodied in the First and Fourth Amendments and the postal system. The popular movements that upheld these principles did not have the political power in the late nineteenth century to overcome the institutional interests that early decisions about the telegraph had allowed to develop.”

More than a decade into the Internet age, are we updating our institutions and legal framework to embrace the potential? Or are incumbent interests going to continue to decide the future? More than a century since the telegraph showed that private corporations have the same abilities as government, do we recognize that the intermediaries of the net exert incredible amounts of control over our basic rights, freedoms and actions?