On April 30, 2013, Germany’s equivalent of the U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security, the Minister of the Interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, visited the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute during his recent visit to Washington, DC.

Join the New America Foundation's Media Policy Initiative to mark the release of Susan Crawford's Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. In the book, Crawford uses the 2011 merger between Comcast and NBCU as a framework to explore how deregulatory changes in policy have created a communications crisis in America. From smartphones and television programming to the cost of high-speed Internet access, Captive Audience illustrates how a handful of companies control our information destiny.

Across the globe, a profound shift is underway. Demands for self-determination are redistributing power from hierarchies to individuals and communities.  Meanwhile, old institutions struggle to adapt to and often resist the modern requirements of participatory government. Transparency is increasing, data is abundant, but systems of public accountability lag behind.  

The first presidential campaign since the 2010 Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision resulted in the most expensive election season ever. Anonymous and unaccountable donors poured in unprecedented amounts of money. While new media, newspapers and radio collected some of this money, the lion’s share ended up in the bank accounts of television broadcast companies. For months the public was bombarded with a tsunami of ads from political campaigns, Super PACs and other shadowy groups—ads that in many cases were only loosely connected to the truth.