“The way they are different is that I don’t think there is any evidence that Google has misbehaved in the way Microsoft misbehaved when they tried to leverage the operating system to protect themselves against competition. So far, they’ve been good guys. But that leads to a question: Why do we expect them to be good guys from now till the end of time?”
Lessig, who benefits from the broad education and reading many Googlers lack, was nevertheless alert to how Google, like Microsoft, might become intoxicated by power and succumb to the same human failures. Of Google, he said, “I fear theirs is an old story about how good people deceive themselves. As Microsoft did in the nineties, you become so convinced that you are good that you become oblivious. I sense that is true at Google today. They’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”
PART THREE. Google Versus the Bears
CHAPTER EIGHT. Chasing the Fox
(2005-2006)
Rupert Murdoch, the audacious and sometimes outrageous media mogul, made another move in July 2005 that unnerved his peers. He was in the habit of doing so. For four decades Murdoch’s News Corporation had been playing bold offense, forcing other media companies to defensively respond. Starting with a single newspaper in Australia, and then England, he build a newspaper empire in both countries, and forced the modernization of newspaper work rules in England. At a time when the audience for the three broadcast networks was aging, he had pioneered the Fox broadcast network, with its youth-oriented programming. He established satellite broadcasting that blanketed much of the globe. He eclipsed the once-dominant CNN in ratings with the Fox cable news network. Journalistically, his impact could be pernicious-spurring tabloid television with his syndicated A Current Affair, fomenting shrill, nineteenth-century press partisanship with Fox News, The Sun in London, and the New York Post. But even as he was disdained in certain quarters, he was always carefully watched. Media companies chase Rupert Murdoch as hounds do a fox.
Murdoch again shocked his peers when he acquired MySpace.com in July 2005 for $580 million. After just two years of existence, the youth-oriented social network and music site had sixteen million monthly visitors; that number would quadruple over the next fourteen months.
Before Murdoch’s announcement, it was expected that Sumner Redstone’s Viacom would lay claim to MySpace. It was a natural fit with Viacom’s MTV, with its own youthful audience of more than eighty million monthly viewers. And it was widely believed that Viacom CEO Tom Freston was close to making the acquisition. But before he could, Murdoch swooped in with a higher offer, which Redstone refused to match. Within months, Redstone had replaced Freston, grousing to associates that had he been more aggressive he could have sealed the MySpace deal. Actually, what happened, according to a Viacom official involved in the negotiations and confirmed by others, was this: “Rupert made a preemptive bid. Sumner told Tom he did not want to get into a bidding war.” The parsimonious Redstone had flashed a red light to Freston.
By acquiring MySpace, Murdoch intended to instill in News Corporation a fresh Web-centric sensibility. By contrast, when Viacom tried to instill its MTV television sensibility online with a music site called MTV Overdrive, it stumbled. In early 2007, MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson announced to the German magazine Der Spiegel, “I think we have replaced MTV MySpace is more convenient. You can search for things, while MTV is just delivering things to you. On MySpace, you can pick your own channel and go where you want. That’s why TV viewership is dropping among the MySpace generation.” MySpace had the traffic and the buzz. MTV had the profits, of course, which MySpace did not have. But Murdoch was nonetheless perceived as once again having set the pace for media companies.
IN THE YEARS SURROUNDING the MySpace deal, Internet visionaries began to dominate discourse in the media, and the prospect of new online challenges attracted some of old media’s most creative minds. New media was invading the entertainment business, becoming a magnet for talent, for those wanting to stretch their muscles or pad their wallets. Believing that new media would define the future, more than a few executives fled old media. Viacom lost one such prominent executive, a man named Albie Hecht. After successfully creating music videos earlier in his career, Hecht oversaw the creation of MTV Network’s Spike TV, which pitches its programming to young adult males, and then was president of Nickelodean Entertainment. But in 2005 Hecht, then fifty-two, suddenly stepped down, saying he wanted to get back to creating products rather than managing them. It was seen as a blow to Viacom. “I left because one of the lessons right now is that the small, fast-moving company with a specific mission can strike. The Viacoms and the rest of them are having a hard time. They take entrepreneurs and make them executives. They take authentic brands and turn them into their brands. And they put bureaucracy into place and reduce the risk taking and speed to market. That’s a killer combination.” Big companies, he said, are too impatient because they can’t explain to public shareholders how they will quickly get a return on start-up investments. He wanted, again, to be a fox.
Hecht, a full-throated enthusiast partial to T-shirts, khakis, and white sneakers, set out on a “vision quest” similar to the one Barry Diller took when he left as CEO of 20th Century Fox in 1991, purchased a PowerBook laptop to explore the new online world, and embarked on a ten-month odyssey to decide where to stake his future. Diller decided that cable would dominate the media’s future. Hecht came to a different conclusion. He had visited studios, directors, writers, producers, digital animation studios, anyone who set out to create programming for the Web. “What kept coming back to me,” he said, “was that the most exciting people, the most exciting work I saw, was all on the Web.” One night as he watched his seventeen-year-old son, his thinking congealed. “He was up in his room,” Hecht said. “He’s on the phone. He’s watching TV He’s playing a video game. He’s IMing. He’s reading-thank God he reads! All at the same time! You look at that and you go, ‘This is a new world with new media and new audience behavior. You have to capture that audience by capturing the way they are engaged.’” His son was not just receiving information or entertainment. He was interacting. This audience wanted different modes of storytelling.
Hecht’s son was typical, according to a 2005 study of media usage among eight- to eighteen-year-olds by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The study reported that young people nationwide spent a daily average of six hours and twenty-one minutes with media; when multitasked activities like reading or listening to music were included, the daily total is eight hours and thirty-three minutes, more than “the equivalent of a full-time job.” Nearly four hours per day was expended watching TV, videos, DVDs, or prerecorded shows, and 40 percent of this time youngsters were multitasking, usually by simultaneously going online. Outside of schoolwork, sixty-two minutes were spent on the computer, forty-nine minutes playing video games, and only forty-three minutes reading. School homework consumed an average of fifty minutes per day. A later study by the market-data firm, Forrester Research, found that Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven spent nearly thirteen hours per week on the Internet, nearly two and one half more hours than they spent watching TV