Slashdot Mirror
FCC Chairman Tries For More Media Consolidation
An anonymous reader writes "FCC chairman Kevin Martin wants to relax rules on how many media outlets one company can own in one market. Democratic commissioner Copps wants to rally the public to stop media consolidation. He says he's 'blowing a loud trumpet' for a 'call to battle' to stop the FCC from giving big media a generous Christmas present."
Perhaps it's Sneaky Time to do this on Holiday Break (for Congress, anyway) so that he won't catch too much hell.
It would make a nice present for Murdoch, and the other media gluttons.
Where I live, we have a newspaper monopoly brought to you by Gannett and the quality of the newspaper plainly stinks, now that they've put all of the competition out of business.
That pesky competition stuff seems all too familiar at the FCC these days. It makes one wonder what might happen if the FCC had the interests of the American consumer in mind, rather than that of the media and telco mega-corps.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
A strong, independent media (meaning: lots of independent sources for news and commentary) is essential to the health of a democracy. (Or even a republic.) Many points of view allows the (cliché inbound!) market of ideas to determine what's best. When there's only a handful of humongous players in that market, they all tend to have an identical set of interests and will likely end up as an oligopoly, much to our detriment.
Media consolidation is, overall, a Bad Thing.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Reddit is starting to turn for the worst also. This new breed of internet people are like locust, they go from one site to another, like locust, consuming all natural resources, and then they move on again, and their coming for us soon. Just like those aliens from Independence Day.
People tend to flock to where the group-think is. Very few people want to be challenged about what they believe on a daily basis- it takes a lot of work, especially if you're willing to admit the possibility you might be wrong. Slashdot tends to have a variety of (highly nerd-centric) views, so it's easy to find a bunch of people who passionately agree with you on issues that most people don't care about: File sharing, the best Star Trek Captain, Emacs vs. Vi, etc. There will be the heretics who disagree with you, but you can always mod up those you agree with and ignore the rest.
That being said, Slashdot would be horrible as my only news source. It's got a huge number of opinions, but most of them are the idealistic ravings of an intelligent but dysfunctional individual with minimal real-world experience. (Something like 80% of non-troll posts are in this category, including most of my own). Then you've got the corporate shills, the grammar Nazis, and the occasional individual who knows what he's talking about. Plus, there are all these rambling posts that are almost on topic, but don't really address the issue at hand- not to mention the article.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
That sounds a lot like, "It's a good thing that we have given the executive so much power, because our president is doing a great job keeping Americans safe from the Iraqi terrorists." It's ok for George's people to listen to your phone calls. But what do you do, once Hillary is elected? Suddenly you're paying for everyone's manditory healthcare insurance, farmed out to some no-bid-contract provider, and she is listening to your phone calls.
What do you do, when you justify centralization of authority, and then after that, the central authority becomes your enemy?
Principles, not examples. Safeguards, not circumstances.
What I mean is, some day, a leftwing commie hippie is going to own 66% of the media. That block will be diverse, too. One channel will be full of ads for marijuana, another full of ads for sex chat lines, and that's not counting The Satan Channel (even though it operates at a loss, subsidized by the sex chat lines).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Like I said, you're describing a corporate anarchy. It is precisely the deregulation that the story we're discussing documents that has allowed the media consolidation I just detailed.
The early US had lots of media competition, but it had no corporations. Corporate personhood, which offered legal protections to corporations, wasn't invented until 1886, when a railroad monopoly faked a legal ruling in the newspaper monopoly it owned, on which the entire corporate scam is based. Within a generation, monopoly corporations had so abused America that they were finally regulated a little with "antitrust" laws, but they've steadily crawled back to unprecedented power and consolidation.
Early America also had no "truth in advertising" or other consumer protection, and frequent ripoffs and unchallenged political abuses. It was also a relatively small country (0.3% in 1776 as in 2007), though the ability to independently publish was very widespread. But as conditions for publishing improved, that power fell into increasingly monopolistic hands. As is the case with all power when the people don't organize to protect ourselves from it - which is exactly what we started America for.
You're right about tech making the FCC's mission irrelevant, if noninterference is part of the tech. I impatiently await phased arrays freeing spectrum myself. Though we'll still need our government to prohibit unhealthy radiation emissions from telecom products, but that should be part of the FDA, the Health agency, or a product safety agency. But you're confusing the FCC's role in controlling content, which is already irrelevant with media client filter tech, widespread tagging activities and busybody ratings orgs, with the FCC's role in controlling the market itself. The media is a unique industry for control by government, because it is so integrated with our government structure that it's still referred to as the Fourth Estate, even though the first (clergy) is (officially) gone, the second and third merged. When spectrum management is unnecessary or minimized, the FCC should be replaced by a "Telecom and Media Agency" which oversees media, prioritizing market protections, consumer protections, primarily discouraging monopolies and cartels.
A bottom line example: without decreasing government protection, this media cartel is threatening the Network Neutrality that makes the Internet the most accessible, diverse - and therefore essential - info source in our society. Markets don't protect themselves. We establish governments to protect ourselves from predators, like the corporations that control most of the media. When we beat them back with better regulation, we'll have a freer society and better media, through increased competition among all of them. Rather than the cozy relationship where the media and government mutually exploit each other to their mutual benefit, entirely at the public's expense.
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make install -not war
Interesting. Would you agree with me that (1) where no scarcity of "voices" exists, as on the Net, there should be no restriction on how many channels one entity can own, how many people they can reach, or what they can say short of fraud, libel, death threats etc.? And/or that (2) to the extent that the FCC or its successor has the power to control ownership of media, it will try to use that power to control content and should be restrained from doing so?
Where I'm most likely to disagree with you here is that I'm skeptical that we'll get "a freer society" from increased government control. Look at the nature of the coercion being used by/against the media, versus the coercion involved in the American Revolution as you refer to it. In the Revolution the people our (moral) ancestors fought were literally pointing guns at them and "declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever." In the case of modern media, the abuses you seem to be referring to are corporations doing things like lying to consumers, taking bribes for good press, or trying through legal means to change how they charge for their services (the Net Neutrality issue). There's no violence involved in those actions, and not even fraud in the last one, and there's always the possibility of an upstart coming along and starting their own media organization. (Fox News, for all its faults, was built as an alternative to what was seen as a monopoly of press opinion.) So, I don't think the comparison between "taming the rampant corporations" and "stopping the British from burning our city" is fair.
On a related note, I see the US health care issue in a similar way. If the current system is so bad, with government heavily involved in it, should we be imposing greater regulation that fossilizes delivery methods (eg. enshrining the idea that employers should pay), or finding ways to encourage people to invent a new free-market model that blows the existing one out of the water?
Revive the Constitution.
I have it on good authority that He looks poorly on the use of "your" where "you're" was intended. And don't even try to use an apostrophe when making plurals.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That pesky competition stuff seems all too familiar at the FCC these days. It makes one wonder what might happen if the FCC had the interests of the American consumer in mind, rather than that of the media and telco mega-corps.
If the FCC really wanted competition on the airwaves they'd allow Pirate and Micropower broadcasters. But instead the FCC does what it can to shutdown them.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The FCC is the Federal Buggy Whip Commission. They are regulating a bunch of dead, dying, or at the very least rapidly-changing businesses. The FCC getting in the action will help neither the businesses nor their consumers. If the radio/tv biz was made 100% unregulated, they'd still have less than even odds of surviving. The web will consume them. You're going to watch TV by browsing to www.desperatehousewifes.com. With the exception of real live stuff, podcasts will eat radio, and even the live will get done somehow or another. Heh, maybe all that free wifi will eventually work.
My fear of allowing the FCC to get up off the mat, is that they'll proclaim they're needed to regulate the Web. They're going to try to stick their nose in the tent.
-- Rabid.
You're going to have to explain how the market is served by your buying a transmitter to drown out the signal of your incumbent competition, broadcasting their format to their old listeners, but with your own ads inserted.
You make it easier for competition to form by protecting the market from domination by a cartel (among other cultivation). That requires regulation - proper regulation. We have living proof of how deregulation, except for regulations that enforce a billionaire's club barrier to entry, creates monopolistic conditions. Since you can't even recognize the basic necessary function of the FCC regulating signal noninterference, you're not going to get anywhere making equally naive pronouncements about government role in mediating an economy.
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make install -not war