Date

2015

Author

Gül, Serhan

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This thesis studies the internet in the context of political economy. For this, it covers the subjects of digital divide, digital inequality, concentration and content of the internet. The main goal of the thesis is to reveal the market structure of the internet today, its relation with the content and user preferences in Turkey. In order to achieve this, we define the political economy of the internet and focus on two components of it, the ownership structure of the internet and the content. In contrast to the common idea, the internet is not only a virtual universe. It's existence is based upon a great physical infrastructure, and its content today represents an enormous economical field. In this respect, this thesis studies both spheres of the internet segmented into their main categories and throughout this study, we aim to develop an extensive analysis of the internet, inequality on the internet, focusing on national and global digital inequality. According to this, our study endeavors how the internet globally not only reproduces inequalities of access and usage to the internet, but also imbalance between the oppressed classes, social groups, developed and undeveloped countries and carries a largely monopolistic structure today. Consequently, this thesis tries to explain how the internet market is structured in Turkey and its dependency relations with foreign capital. In this regard, we illustrate the strong correlation between concentration and increasing mainstream and commercial content on the internet in Turkey and arrive at conclusions and suggestions for rethinking the possibilities of a democratic internet.

Subject Keywords

Internet, Internet, Internet, Internet industry., Internet users., Digital divide.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12619343/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/25090

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis