There's a behavioural difference here. If I don't see someone speak on a TV channel, then I don't assume they don't exist / aren't important. If I search for someone via Google / other search engine, and they don't come up, or their opponents come up far higher in the rankings than they do, then I imagine (without having done any proper studies on this) that it will influence my opinion of them more.
I also don't buy the argument that Google having huge powers of, effectively, no-platforming is any less terrifying because TV channels have had it for a long time. This is just as bad!
There are not thousands of television channels in the US that will broadcast political content such that presidential candidates can push their message across them.
The average American household has access to just 150-200 TV channels, total. Most of those would never carry anything related to the election. The vast majority of those are specific content carriers: movies, music, on-demand, sports. You're down to having a few dozens channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNBC, MSNBC, local affiliates etc) that a candidate can push through.
There are 2,200x tv stations in the US. Most of those are small, local stations with zero national or regional reach.
There are thousands of online sites and platforms that at least have as large of an audience as those stations. All of those sites can be reached by almost anyone in the US, which is not true of the local TV stations.
Further, there is nothing even remotely like: Reddit, Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, Facebook, et al. in the television realm, where just about anyone can reach a national audience if their message resonates (and do so for free). There is also nothing like the app options that are available online, whether Snapchat, Instagram, or voter reach apps like NationBuilder.
More importantly those 150-200 channels or few dozen political content channels are owned by a VERY small number of very large corporations. Five or so.
>Terrifying? I assume you're living in a constant state of fear then, because television networks already have and use that power.
First, there are lots of tv networks.
Second, yes, regarding that matter, we SHOULD fear the power of tv networks.
I don't even understand the reasoning here: "why do you call Google having curation/censorship power fearsome, since tv networks already have curation/censorship power?".
Obviously because curation/censorship power of a level and above (e.g. not your local high school paper) is troubling.
Instead of seeing Google as rising as a new kind of ruler, enforcing a new kind of authority, I think it's more appropriate to see it as grafting itself onto an already existing authority.
So to me it's not clear cut whether the centralizing power Google brings with its resources overweights the decentralizing power from dividing such authority into more parts.
And as an aside it also seems foolish to worry about this when said political system itself guarantees that the majority of the population can't be properly represented unless they agree with each other, which is precisely the problem media control solves.
That would be of concern (regarding elections), if the system wasn't a rigged, 2-party system for a century or so -- where there are strict conventions of who gets to be heard and who can run (including needing some millions of the campaign), with BS primaries, and party nominations and such.
