Here is the vision, or the nightmare: one single mega-corp, an American giant, which delivers down its cable, to your own home, every intellectual morsel (it thinks) you need - the films, sitcoms and documentaries it has made; the news it makes; the information and e-mail services it controls; the chat-rooms it monitors; the celebrities it has made famous. Enough moving pictures and words to last a thousand lifetimes.

This is the fantasy of total control, the dream of domination, that has allowed the world's largest ever merger last week, the coming-together of Time Warner, with its world news from CNN, its 5,700 films, its Time publishing empire, and 120 million magazine readers, its TV shows such as Friends and ER and its cable channels; and America Online, the world's biggest Internet provider, with over 23 million paid subscruibers.

To understand quite what these corporate giants are up to, you need to remember that super-fast cable links will make what we now call the Internet seem as limited as the first hand-cranked telephones now look in the world of mobile telephony. Before long, you will not only be able to carry the Internet around with you on handsets, but your home will be able to receive huge quantities of films and words through high-speed cable or broadband links, 24 hours a day. There will be no need to hook up, no wait, no dial tone.

Thus, within days of the new century beginning, some of the most familiar cultural divisions of the twentieth century already look as if they are starting to blur, to fuzz at the edges. Telephone companies? Television? Radio networks? News companies? Entertainment companies? The Internet itself, as a separate thing? All these categories are swimming into one another through the logic of corporate mergers and the tech nologies of voice recognition, broadband, faster cable and webcasting.

Before you feel your head swim, recall that this is therefore, above all, a political matter. The super-company will be able, in theory, to offer you a kind of complete media bubble, an all-in-one service that anticipates your preferences and gives you what you want, when you want it. Or what you think you want. For this is extraordinary power and, if this capitalist fantasy was realised, it would only start with news and entertainment. Your provider of laughter and of glimpses at the outside world would soon become your banker, or a good friend of your banker. Its advertisers would be your suppliers.

Its world-view would, no doubt, look varied - even the Murdoch empire, running from Bart Simpson to William Rees-Mogg, is pretty eclectic in style. For the new super-company, there would be no aggressive ban on other sources of infotainment. There would be no need. Its perpetual household bubble would be just thick enough to make it a bother to go elsewhere. The convenience of a single huge supplier, a hypermarket of the imagination, and the cross-promotion that allows, would keep rivals out, huddled in the obscure shacks on the wrong side of the tracks. AOL's Steve Case has virtually admitted as much.

Nor should we assume that governments would be alarmed by the emergence of the media/entertainment/commerce super-company. In some ways, politicians would like them for making life simpler. They would be easier to cut deals with. Their products would be sanitised and their political views would be predictable. Already, AOL faces a vociferous hostile alliance (see www.aolsucks.org for instance) accusing it of censorship, a row that became white-hot last September when the company kicked the American Civil Liberties Union off its sites. The more the Net is in the hands of a few giant outfits, the less anarchy, the more control, the easier for political establishments everywhere.

This, of course, is the utter negative of the world the Internet pioneers hoped to create, as unlike the original vision as Microsoft's Seattle is unlike the simple farming economy the first Western settlers dreamed of as they jolted down the Oregon Trail. The Net offered, and still offers, the ideal of individual anti-corporate power, a world-wide wash of free information, serendipity and random friendship.

So it is hardly surprising that, after the corporate American back-slapping, thinking America quickly signalled alarm. Consumer groups started talking of 'a giant media and Internet dictatorship'. Writing for the Internet magazine Salon , the former Netscape employee Jamie Zawinski argued that 'this should worry people in the same way and for the same reasons that the sheer size of the media corporations should worry them. This kind of vertical integration makes it harder for the public to hear anything but the corporate party line...'

And Mark Crispin Miller, of New York University, argued bitterly: 'Conflict of interest is now so widespread that the phrase almost has no meaning any longer. AOL will now have every reason to cram its offerings with Time Warner product. AOL will tend to guide us toward sites that feature the latest Warner Brothers release, the TV shows and the movies that Warner Brothers produces...' And another commentator chipped in that 'content may be king, but access to the home is king-maker'.

Some readers may be wondering by now how much all this affects them - a column about US corporate mergers attacked by US liberal critics. First, we live in an Atlantic culture. Second, when it comes to the really powerful media influences, Britain's monopoly laws are the monopoly laws  that Washington chooses. Here, we have comparatively tiny media companies struggling to merge, to grow from minnows to little trout. Even the BBC is small compared to the killer-pike breeding on Wall Street.

But this is not an inevitable 'force of history' event. Every time, so far, that some government, group or company has dreamed of total control, and every time thinkers have wailed that this is The Future, then The Future has fallen apart. This time, a day after ecstatically hailing the AOL-Time Warner merger as 'a marriage made in heaven', Wall Street stripped $30 billion off the companies' joint value - about a seventh of their value, which is some going for a 24-hour second thought. Why? Partly because companies all have their own cultures, and Time Warner is already a ramshackle empire. Case looked like a tubby, cold-eyed predator in a feeding frenzy as he embraced Gerald Levin of Time Warner. The financial world concurs that, in reality, smaller, junior AOL is devouring the more senior company. But this may be a hard meal to digest: corporate history is littered with takeovers that failed to deliver.

Nor have either governments or consumers been quite as easy to manipulate as the control fantasists hoped. Microsoft, which had seemed too big for the ordinary rules, has been stopped in its tracks by government lawyers.

Monsanto has been gutted by the consumer revolt across Europe. Murdoch's notorious boast that British national newspapers would soon be reduced to just three titles - the Times, the Daily Mail and the Sun - looks, today, merely quaint.

Keeping the Internet open and free matters. The more easy, star-struck capital, and converging technologies allow super-companies to emerge, the more we need democracy to fight for variety and fair markets. And we need it for one reason above all - the single glaring omission in this article so far, the essence without which all the excitement about share prices, mergers, corporate strategy and technological innovation means nothing at all: content. We need variety and danger to get a better, livelier social conversation - in short, to make ourselves more intelligent.

We can produce faster, brighter, neater, cheaper ways of delivering pictures and words. But outside science we cannot, it seems, produce any great new stories, works of musical or dramatic genius, fresh social or political thinking or unexpected insights. Our thinking and story-telling are getting as grey and slow as our technology is fast. And so it will stay as long as the corporate giants lumber across our dreams.
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Also see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/jan-june00/aol_01-10.html
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