Since the turn of the 21st century, traditional newspaper and music industry revenues have fallen dramatically, with similar drops in film, television, and general print media companies. Traditional media’s spectacular falls in revenue are in stark contrast to the meteoric rise in revenues of their new Internet-based counterparts.

Taplin describes the dramatic growth of the Internet-based companies of Silicon Valley--notably Amazon, Facebook, Google, and YouTube--and how their rapid rise has been helped by government deregulation, opaque business practices, concentrated market power, and the subordination of user privacy for corporate gain. These business practices are in contrast to the altruistic libertarianism that characterized early Internet startups.

Taplin’s introduction sets the scene and briefly describes the concepts and players. He then introduces readers to the rapid, recent rise of companies with Internet-based business models and the corresponding decline of traditional businesses.

Chapter 1 discusses the disruption caused by the Internet’s movement away from academic curiosity and toward the world of business and commerce. In particular, Taplin discusses the apparent immunity of large tech companies from antitrust scrutiny and the coinciding antiregulatory, libertarian push of the Regan era in the US. In chapter 2, Taplin recounts his personal experiences in the music recording industry at the end of the era of vinyl records and CDs, including YouTube’s dramatic impact on the revenues of recording artists. Chapter 3 explores the early roots of technologies that would shape the future of Internet technologies. The graphical user interface (GUI), mouse, World Wide Web, Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) are discussed.

Chapter 4 looks at the US political environment in the early 1980s. Taplin explains the reactionary conservative belief that the answer to the country’s problems lies in the removal of government regulation and oversight, as well as how this environment benefited rising Internet businesses. The impact of Internet organizations on the entertainment industry is discussed in chapter 5. Taplin introduces some of the personalities involved in the rise of Napster, Facebook, and YouTube, along with how these organizations have impacted the traditional music industry.

Chapter 6 discusses the roots of American obsession with monopolies and the seeming inability of US antitrust laws to prevent the rise of Internet monopolies. Chapter 7 then discusses some of the methods that these Internet monopolies have employed to defeat attempts to rein in their power.

Chapter 8 looks at how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, discusses those involved in its development and dramatic growth, and examines the psychology of its operation. Chapter 9 looks at the rise of Internet sites with business models based on pirating copyright materials for profit while hiding behind the claim of freedom of speech. The revenue flows to music piracy file-sharing sites from advertising fed by large Internet corporations such as Google and Yahoo are discussed. In chapter 10, Taplin supports the proposition that “personal data is the new oil” and discusses how Internet companies extract personal data from their user base and resell it at a high margin. He looks at a small number of right-wing libertarian businessmen and the influence that their monopoly capitalism has in the US. Chapter 11 discusses whether the digital revolution is robbing us of our humanity and asks how it overshot the altruistic goals of its early supporters. Taplin examines social media addiction and the impact of Internet anonymity on the restraints that people normally and unconsciously apply to traditional face-to-face social interactions.

The final chapter briefly discusses whether some form of revival, similar to the Italian Renaissance, may save the Internet from the greed of the monopolies that have come to control it. Potential options for the fair use of copyrighted material and potential laws for its administration are discussed, although the extraterritorial reach that such laws would need in order to be effective is not addressed. Taplin’s views are a very interesting, albeit US-centric, commentary on the current state of the Internet. The book has a detailed index, a good section of explanatory notes by chapter, as well as introductory and afterward chapters that neatly summarize Taplin’s main points. It is an interesting look at how large Internet monopolies have arisen, how they operate, and the impact they have had on traditional businesses and artists in particular. In the wake of recent revelations and privacy scandals involving Facebook and others, this is quite a timely publication.

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