Is the role of the government and media policy moot in the age of the Internet? While it is surely true that the social organization of news media and their relations with diverse publics are complicated by the Internet, it is highly debatable whether this has led to a disintegration or dispersal of power, as some philosophers have argued. And while the Internet enables new forms of democratic public engagement, there is already considerable empirical evidence that old commercial media patterns are reappearing or even being accentuated on the Web, such as the continued dominance of a handful of large.
