Caught in a corporate net?

What does the mega-merging taking place in the media mean for access to information online? Will big service providers like America Online take control of the freewheeling information highway?

At the moment it seems unlikely. In some countries there are strict controls over what people are allowed to access online. In Burma, for instance, new regulations control the "democracy technology" so you can't, for instance, set up a website without state permission.

And there are those who fear the more liberal West will now be subject to conglomerate control.

What does seem possible is that there will be so much available through AOL's online sites that users won't bother surfing elsewhere. A sort of human lethargy will, in fact, limit our access to the Internet.

"Already a lot of AOL users think AOL is the Internet," says Fiachra O Marcaigh, editor of the Computimes page, every Monday in The Irish Times. "The site is so big people just don't need to go outside it."

Through such sites, issues with potential legal implications may get a more restricted airing than they have to date on the freewheeling Internet. "People will get more careful about what they publish. There was a time with the Internet when you could do just about anything; these days people are taking defamation cases and curtailing all that. But apart from legal or decency issues, it is unlikely people will get squeezed," O Marcaigh says.

Mega-mergers are part of a worldwide globalisation trend. One of the most recent is the Vodafone/Mannesmann take-over, regarded as just the first of many more telecommunications mergers to come. According to Barry O'Keeffe, writing in The Irish Times last week, "what's driving consolidation is mobile phone telephony and the move towards downloading data through mobile handsets" - yes, surfing the Net on your mobile phone is with us. So will we see telecommunications companies merge with content providers?

Still in its infancy, online phone technology is relatively expensive and cumbersome. Within the coming years it should get a lot easier. But still, if it's going to remain mobile, the phone and the tools to allow Internet access will have to be quite simple and compact.

The technology is set to develop in ways which will pave the way for access to more information. "Within a few years, mobile phones will use a different system to the current GSM, based on a wider bandwidth. You'll have a screen attached to the phone," O Marcaigh says, "and theoretically you'll be able to download a film and watch it on the phone. However, physically, it will be most useful for things like a weather update, or a quick browse through what's on."

Whatever about WAP (wireless application protocol) technologies, surfing the net on the telly is just around the corner for quite a few of us. Your typical new-age conglomerate might well own the cable company and the service provider and have an interest in a media company. Again, few companies are likely overtly to censor the sites you can access, but ease of access will limit people's need to check out alternative information.

"Companies will have control over what you see first, and research shows lots of people don't bother moving away from that site," O Marcaigh says. For both mobile-phone and television Internet use, it's easy to imagine that the tendency to point-and-click where we're encouraged to do by AOL or NTL or Microsoft will be even greater than it is when we're sitting at a PC, which we're used to seeing as a more active medium.

How or whether information online is controlled remains to be seen, but people are worried. According to an editorial in The Nation, "Open access has been a hallmark of the Internet . . . But the rush of mergers . . . create the worrisome prospect that before long we will have the equivalent of television: 500 channels and nothing worth watching; while the cacophony of independent voices that makes for vibrant public discourse will be pushed to the margins, where hardly anyone will even know to look for them."