The End of Digital Democracy

Stuart Park writes: "According to this article, this year could be very important for media ownership and internet access with a lot of pressure on the FCC and the U.S. Government to remove restrictions thus allowing a small number of large corporations to control everything. Help stop it happening via this link."

Comments

Restrictions weren't tight enough before

[dh003i]

The idea of loosening restrictions is absurd, as they weren't tight enough before. Allowing 30% ownership of the market? That means that an ENTIRE market can be almost completely owned by 4 companies. This is not a good condition for competition, and allows companies to easily set up cartels.

History has proven time and again that monopolies never serve the public's interest overall. They may have some fringe benefits, but overall, in the long run, they always screw the public interest over -- good intentions or not. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T, and MS are just some examples. Lets take AT&T: as Lawrence Lessig states, the idea for redundant networks and datagrams (packets) as a method to carry data in a phone conversation had been proposed to AT&T very early one; they rejected it, even though it was superior, because of the risk. Were there competition, it would've been implemented. MS, another example, engages in competition squashing, and prevents any other OS from competing, as all hardware and software developers (or almost all) develop for Windows; furthermore, they use their monopoly in one position to try to gain a monopoly in another.

No company should be allowed to obtain over 10% of the market. If they do, the company should have to mandatorily be split into two separate parts of equal amount. The shareholders would still have the same amount and value in stocks; only difference is, the companies would have to compete.