Success Quote by Joichi Ito

A little clumsy in syntax, Joichi Ito's line lands because it sounds like someone watching the floor drop out from under the civic bargain in real time. The phrasing "Now that" is doing heavy work: it assumes a tipping point has already been crossed, not a future risk. He's not warning about corruption as an abstract vice; he's describing a market mechanism that has started eating the institutions meant to referee it.

Ito pairs "media companies" with "policies" to make a deliberately unsettling claim: information and governance are being treated as comparable assets, priced and traded. That flattening is the subtext. Once journalism becomes just another portfolio company and public policy becomes an investable outcome, democratic accountability stops being a check on capital and starts being a product of it. The real fear isn't merely biased coverage or lobbying; it's that the feedback loop between power, narrative, and law becomes self-sealing.

His rhetorical question is a trap door. In healthy democracies, the answer is supposed to be obvious: voters, regulators, courts, a free press. By asking "what is there", he suggests those checks are either captured, weakened, or outspent. "Continuing consolidation" and "diminishing of democracy" read like twin trends, not a moral panic: as ownership concentrates, so does agenda-setting, so does the range of acceptable policy, so does the public's ability to meaningfully consent.

Context matters: Ito comes from the tech and venture world, where "consolidation" is often framed as efficiency. Here, he flips that familiar story into a civic cost-benefit analysis, implying the market has become too good at buying the levers that were designed to restrain it.