, however to the customers because it means that they have a virtual billboard flashing at them when they are on the internet all the time.The huge boom in the use of the internet as a tool for joining corporate forces poses many future problems to contend with. Time Warner has had a huge influence on the way the whole world views internet companies. The AOL-Time Warner merger provides credible evidence of the lines becoming even more blurred. AOL's CEO Steve Case argues that "this merger launches the next Internet revolution". The importance of Monday's deal was not its financial size, but instead it was the fact that for the first time an Internet company bought an established traditional media company rather than the other way around. It was at that point that the Internet stopped being seen as a medium just for the people who are in the field and instead emerged as the dominant force that is responsible for shaping our entertainment, along with our information and our communications. It is now at the foreground for media corporations to take hold of it, and sap all of the resources that are available.There are also many social costs from the merger that are substantial. The synergies indicate that there is an increase in market power. Now, AOL will be able to give special position to Time-Warner content, at the expense of content that might be better but doesn't have the market power of a "synergistic" merger behind it. The consumer will be faced with either believing the content of the ads they see, about the quality of a product, or having to question not only the ads intentions but also those of whoever is hosting the ad. Competition will be weakened not only by the preferential treatment given own-content within this vertically integrated giant, which will make it tougher for outsiders to reach and/or sell to target audiences, it will decline because of the rush to consolidate into comparable giants by AOL's and Time-Warner's ri...
