San Antonio, Texas -- With a new focus on acquiring content that was previously relegated to pay TV services, social media and tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google are focusing more on disrupting traditional pay TV, director of USC’s Annenberg School of Media Innovation Lab and author Jonathan Taplin told an audience at the opening keynote of the NCTC Winter Educational Conference here.

Read More: Additional Coverage of the NCTC Winter Educational Conference

Taplin, whose book Move Fast and Break Things traced the monopolization of the internet by Google Facebook and Amazon, noted that while over the years those three companies focused on other business segments, they are increasingly honing in on the video business. Facebook’s $610 million bid for streaming rights to Indian Cricket matches – it lost out to Fox – is just one example of how serious the tech giants are becoming about video.

The largest corporations of the world -- Google, Amazon and Facebook --  are going to be the new gatekeepers, Taplin said.  

In addition to Cricket rights, Facebook has tried to incorporate its GUI into set-top boxes as part of the Federal Communications Commission’s “Unlock the Box” initiative back in 2016, which has since fizzled in the new administration but could surface again. Taplin said giving Facebook access to set-tops cold decimate pay TV’s local ad business.

“They’ll keep trying that,” Taplin said. “So, you’ve got to be careful.”

Adding to the pressure is that the next generation of TV viewers have grown up with 100-Mbps broadband connections, creating their own media systems without cable.

“You have to be aware that this notion of cord-cutting is real,” Taplin said. “These companies are coming for your business.”

Taplin said operators can fight back in several ways, offering skinnier programming bundles in response to competition and reliable, high-speed data connections. He added that the traditional method of delivering and buying programming also will change in the future.

The current ecosystem where distributors are forced to buy large bundles of programming from content providers, even those shows that have little viewership, has to change, he added.

“A lot of those channels don’t pass the ‘who cares’ test,” Taplin said. "You have to stand up to the channels that nobody is watching.”

Jonathan Taplin, director emeritus of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, warns that the government will soon have to decide whether to regulate edge-provider giants like common carriers.

The FCC has already done that with Internet service providers, via Title II reclassification, under former chairman Tom Wheeler and with the blessing of President Barack Obama, though the new administration is set on reversing that.

But in an op ed in The New York Times, Taplin said the power of the edge is something the government will need to reckon with, now or later.

He suggested that the government will likely have to step in given that "Google has an 88 percent market share in search advertising, Facebook (and its subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) owns 77 percent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon has a 74 percent share in the e-book market."

Taplin said that at a minimum those Big Three should not be allowed to do any other buying-up of companies like Snapchat or Spotify, and if the government leaves them to their own devices, it may ultimately have to force them to divest as it ultimately forced the breakup of AT&T's nautral monopoly.

"Force Google to sell DoubleClick," Taplin wrote. "Force Facebook to sell WhatsApp and Instagram."

He said other steps the government could take include regulating them like public utilities; requiring them to license out patents for nominal fees, as the government required Bell Labs to do; or removing the safe harbor from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows Facebook and YouTube to take a "free ride" on content produced by others.

He suggested that might not be a priority for the Trump administration given that Trumpthe president is close with "libertarian" tech moguls like Peter Thiel. The Obama Administration, by contrast, was generally thought to be tight with the folks at Google, and Wheeler consistently held to the position that the FCC could not regulate the edge and did not use the bully pulpit to suggest that its most powerful players were a gatekeeper threat to Internet openness on par with ISPs.

But Taplin sees it differently.

"We are going to have to decide fairly soon whether Google, Facebook and Amazon are the kinds of natural monopolies that need to be regulated, or whether we allow the status quo to continue, pretending that unfettered monoliths don’t inflict damage on our privacy and democracy," he wrote.

Taplin, a USC professor until last year, is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.