WWBGD??? What Would Bill Gates Do?

What would you do if 8 media conglomerates had pretty much entire control over the US market?

If you answered "do what I'm doing now because I know that the last question posed was one of those stupid - the answer is supposed to shock me but it won't because I know by what you said in the last sentence that 8 conglomerates do control everything - questions" ...then you are correct.

These media giants are scary for a couple of reasons - first, the larger companies get the smaller the market "pool" gets. As we all learned in class, this kinda stuff limits competition as well as homogenizing what we see through certain media channels.

However, without these giants we may be in trouble as well. "Too big to fail" was a term used to describe the magnitude to which these companies matter in our current world. In 2006 the largest conglomerate was General Electric (Which owns NBC). Now GE is talking about selling NBC to Comcast? This would probably take GE out of the conglomerate position - but it would also thrust Comcast up into one of the top spots.

Whether we like it or not, these conglomerates have a HUGE amount of control. Without them, what little economic output the US produces would drop considerably. Imagine if Microsoft just suddenly decided to stop making Windows. Though Apple is gaining a small amount of market share, PC's running Windows still make up over 90% of the market... and these PC's are worldwide.

The moral of this particular blog story is that.... well..... Conglomerates matter. We can talk all day long about the importance of keeping media from getting too large (and that is important, don't get me wrong.) but we HAVE GOT TO consider the implications for suddenly breaking down such massive companies. Besides, as the CEO of GE has proven... (mainly by being a nice guy) the have feelings too.

I'll leave you all with this --- What Would Bill Gates Do? In Bill we Trust? You get the idea.