I just want to point some eyeballs to a great article on Ars Technica that ought to be mandatory reading for the good people at Daily Kos. It has some especially juicy history of the Associated Press. I had no idea!
How Robber Barons hijacked the "Victorian Internet"
Ars revisits those wild and crazy days when Jay Gould ruled the telegraph and Associated Press reporters helped fix presidential elections. Is government supervision really the worst thing that can happen to a communications network?
As Mark Twain said, "History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes". With the prospective merger of Comcast and NBC, we're looking at a nasty stanza of corporate consolidation and anti-competitive behavior.