Susan P Crawford, Columnist

How Amazon Plans to Storm Cable's Castle

For Amazon, Twitch is about more than just gaming.

September 2, 2014 at 4:09 PM UTC

Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive Audience." Her book "The Responsive City," with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, will be published in September. In 2009, Susan Crawford served as special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy. She is a former law partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale). She is the founder of OneWeb Day, a global Earth Day for the Internet held each Sept. 22. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and a law degree from Yale University.

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Amazon.com Inc.'s announcement last week that it would pay $970 million in cash to buy Twitch Interactive Inc., a hugely popular game-streaming service that is just over three years old, marks a key moment for telecommunications policy in the U.S. But the reason might be unexpected.

E-games substituting for "real" sports is not news: There is nothing more human than the desire to be close to the lives of gladiators and other celebrities, and online interaction will fulfill that need at an enormous scale. What is crucial is that the destiny of Twitch, Netflix Inc. and any other future high-capacity streaming service -- think telemedicine, education and civic engagement -- is utterly dependent on the goodwill of just four companies: Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc.