Science & Tech Quote by Joichi Ito

A businessman’s complaint that reads like a warning label: if the pipes are narrow and the broadcaster owns the faucet, “public opinion” is less a conversation than a managed feed. Joichi Ito’s line isn’t really about bandwidth. It’s about leverage. Low internet penetration isn’t just a tech metric; it’s a political condition that keeps alternative narratives expensive, slow, and socially peripheral. In that environment, legacy media doesn’t merely compete with the internet. It preempts it.

The phrase “Berlusconi media machine” does heavy lifting. “Machine” implies something industrial: disciplined, repeatable, optimized for output rather than truth. Ito is pointing to a system where control is structural, not conspiratorial - a blend of ownership, regulatory influence, and cultural habituation that makes certain stories feel inevitable and others unthinkable. The subtext is that Italy’s democracy is being negotiated in a closed room, with the TV still acting as the national hearth.

Context matters: Berlusconi’s Italy was a case study in modern media power, where a political leader also sat atop a sprawling commercial broadcast empire, shaping not only news agendas but the emotional weather of daily life. Ito, coming from the networked world, frames the internet as the escape hatch - but notes it isn’t installed widely enough to matter. The intent is both diagnosis and provocation: modern citizenship requires modern distribution. Without it, “what people see” becomes a proxy for what they’re allowed to imagine.