The terms vertical and horizontal are useful in this context. They are borrowed from contrasting models of institutional organization, but they neatly encapsulate:

1. The contrast between this early utopian vision for analogue radio and the industry it became.

2. The differences inherent in the technologies of the phone-based Internet and of the traditional broadcast industries.

Horizontal describes the situation in which all the participants have an equal status, where communication passes freely between them and control is evenly dispersed: vertical describes the opposite, where status is differentiated into a hierarchy in which information is controlled at the centre and communication flows not across, but upwards and mainly downwards from the few at the head of the hierarchy to the many at the bottom. Remembering the early utopian visions of radio, then, horizontal describes a strongly interactive, equal relationship between the listener and programme maker, while vertical describes the broadcast infrastructure that radio adopted, in which a small number of broadcasters disseminate to a mass audience. In this scheme, the commercial and public service sectors of the international radio industry (see below) are in the vertical category; their transmission systems are vertical and their organizational management vertical. Meanwhile, stations which aim to offer an alternative to the mainstream or dominant broadcast structures have, by definition, more horizontal characteristics.

Hence, vertical broadcast institutions:

• are large organizations reliant on economies of scale,

• are therefore hierarchical and top down ,

• are managed centrally, at a distance from the listener,

• need large...