Do media conglomerates produce monopolies in thought? Can principles from open source software be applied to resist such a closing?

In his recently resurfaced and pointedly relevant 1943 speech "The Crisis in Public Opinion," Canadian political economist Harold Innis predicts that the centralization of government and media will become a liability to freedom of thought in Western Civilization. No One Knows Everything considers how to counter what Innis called "monopolies of knowledge" by looking at the history of the press since 1850 alongside open source projects like Linux, Apache,...