This is the question that the LA Times posed in a story about the writers strike.

First the music industry was disintermediated by the internet, and now the movie and TV industries are waking up, courtesy of the writers, to the fact that the only game in town is Google.... and perhaps Microsoft.... or Apple.

These are the companies that make money out of free content, where of course 'free' is a proxy for ad supported.

I was in the music business for 30 years give or take a year. And I left the business partly because there was no sense of magic anymore. Back when I first was signed to CBS Records in the UK in 1967 and then when I came to Australia and joined the business side of the deal there was a fine sense of madness about what we did. The people who had the zany ideas for the promotion, for the song, for the record, for the gig... these people came to the fore.

Then as adult supervision took hold, the business was dominated by marketing metrics. And out of marketing metrics you get a monoculture of profit now at any cost.

I remember saying here in the early 90's when the record companies were resisting the government's efforts to have them drop prices, that the internet would do for the record business what the ACC failed to do. The fact that the record industry thought that they could hold back the tide was an act of supreme arrogance. The same thing is happening to the other parts of the content industry in Hollywood now. It is a sad indictment on the intelligence of man that some people think that they can control price points in a world that wants content to be free, and now is able to make it so.

That is the legacy of digitization.

Google is in control. Essentially by saying, "we don't want to be in control of anything... except the ad insertion".