AT&T’s resurrection as a dominant player across telecoms, media, and
internet in 1998 also fueled concerns that the open, end-to-end internet
was being sacri! ced on the altar of corporate consolidation and convergence.
The company’s Internet Services CEO, Daniel Somers, further stoked the
" ames by exclaiming, “AT&T didn’t spend $56 billion to get into the cable
business to have the blood sucked out of our veins” (quoted in Lessig 2000:
995). Legal decisions at the time giving AT&T the First Amendment right to
program, edit, and control its network as it saw ! t also seemed to bless the
corporate takeover of the internet ( Comcast Cablevision v. Broward County
1999). Telefonica’s (Spain) purchase of Dutch television producer Endomol
(e.g. “Big Brother,” “Fear Factor,” “Deal or No Deal”) and the ISP Terra
Lycos as well as the French utility and telecoms provider Vivendi’s acquisition
of Universal Film Studios indicated that these trends were global. As Peter
Curwen (2008) observed in 1999, in the ! rst of an annual series of articles
published over the following decade, “the era of the telecoms, or perhaps
more appropriately simply ‘coms,’ dinosaurs bestriding the world is upon us”
(Curwen 2008: 3). Or was it?