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More Media Consolidation Coming Soon
Logic Bomb writes: "According to the Washington Post, a federal appeals court yesterday made a ruling that could make the last couple years of media consolidation look like nothing. Some major FCC rules about media ownership were ruled as "arbitrary" and therefore illegal, most importantly the one preventing a company from owning the cable system and television stations in the same place. Also, though the FCC gets one more chance to defend it, the rule about a company not owning stations reaching more than 35% of the national viewership may get tossed out too."
Who Owns What, the list keeps getting smaller and the entries get longer.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
How can this not be a concern for us? All these giant media companies control all sorts of media. TV - OTA, satelite and cable, internet sites, internet access via cable, DSL, dialup, or wireless, and telephones both normal and wireless, magizines, newspapers and radio. These media companies also control movie and music distribution and will dictate new technologies that remove our rights. The also control the primary news sources. This certainly matters to anyone that cares about technology.
DirecTV has only gone up once in the entire company history, and that was by $2.00 for all packages. Who needs cable?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra