by Clyde Wayne Crews
April 30, 2007

Given today’s debates over so-called “net neutrality,” content regulation of media, “a la carte” pricing of programming packages, newly announced mergers between communications firms like XM and Sirius, and more, the stakes of this debate are high for the communications industry as a whole—not just broadcast companies subject to today’s particular ownership restrictions. Controlling the structure of media is a way of regulating it across the board, whether through outright regulations or threats of regulation. The entire communications industry—from broadcasters to content providers to infrastructure providers—should be on guard.

Currently, regulations prohibit broadcast companies from owning stations that reach more than 35 percent of the public. Other restrictions apply to local TV station ownership and to newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership.

Groups on the left, alongside conservative organizations, protest any relaxation of restrictions. They argue that media is too large and monolithic, and claim that concentrated media ownership threatens diversity, localism and democracy. Both sides support government regulation of media and want to retain and even tighten it.

But “big media” is actually no threat in our free society. Media companies are conduits for information of every sort, but as private parties, they cannot monopolize it.

Without government censorship there is no fundamental scarcity of information, nor can there be; more information can always be created, and particularly in our Internet-enabled age, nobody can silence anybody else. (Activists are even breaking through Internet information blackouts in China and other censor-happy regimes.)

The most “big media” can do is refuse to share megaphones and soapboxes, figuratively speaking, which doesn’t violate anyone’s rights or threaten democracy and expression.

Real suppression requires censorship, the prohibition of the airing of alternative views. Ironically, government-established ownership rules are a far closer relation to true censorship.

Media ownership rules were largely devised during the mid-20th century, when the broadcast landscape, nationally and locally, was drastically different. There was no thousand-channel cable television, satellite TV and radio, nor of course, the Internet and the Web, e-mail, blogging, social networking and YouTube.

Media is a business, with upstream and downstream threats and pressures—disgruntled customers, programmers, authors, artists, advertisers, Wall Street analysts and hostile takeovers.

Any media enterprise that attempts to “monopolize” faces their wrath; there’s no necessary FCC policing role. Ownership restrictions impede that competitive discipline by blocking even those who might otherwise have seen clear to mounting a profitable challenge against a large incumbent.

The FCC ownership waivers, such as when a newspaper or broadcaster faces financial trouble, provide tacit admission that scale can enhance the delivery of information. But waivers should not be special favors requiring pandering. The best approach is to separate speech and state entirely.

Sometimes, the “demise” of “localism” or local programming—one of the alleged concerns—may not be inherently bad. Local news can be lousy and stilted and prejudiced. Regardless, the existence of USA Today doesn’t contradict or threaten the church bulletin.

We ought not petition the FCC to tighten its regulatory grip, but rather phase out that agency’s involvement in price, entry and ownership regulation altogether. FCC’s commissioners should be leading that charge in today’s cornucopia-like communications environment; the fact that they’re not is deeply discouraging. We’re witnessing political turf building rather than the needed shifting communications policy toward the marketplace’s own aggressive discipline. Policymaking and national road-show workshops like the FCC’s Tampa event today should instead address government’s own policies that artificially restrict bandwidth and spectrum.

Media ownership rules harm consumers and speech. It will take vast resources to build the broadband networks of tomorrow and to create the increasingly narrow-casted content that consumers are demanding. Mergers and cross-ownership freedom, perhaps on an unprecedented scale, are part of the market processes needed to take communications services to new heights.

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