Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
“It was then, and is now, the largest merger in American business history,” notes Tim Arango of the New York Times about the AOL-Time Warner mega-merger, which happen ten years this month. And yet, as he points out in his essay, “How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong,” things didn’t end up going so [...]
I just finished Ken Auletta’s latest book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, and I highly recommend it. Auletta is an amazingly gifted journalist and knows how put together a hell of good story. It helps in this case that he was granted unprecedented access to the Google team and their [...]
As I noted in my recent paper, “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC,” every time a media merger is proposed we hear all sorts of silly Chicken Little predictions of impending doom. Among the more entertaining claims we hear are conspiracy theories about supposed nefarious schemes to take over [...]
I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact. Here‘s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below. _____________________________ A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time [...]
I was just digging through some old files and came across a quote that I found entertaining. Back in 2003, when he was still president and chief operating officer of Viacom, Mel Karmazin said with reference to Microsoft, AOL-Time Warner, and Comcast: “I can’t imagine being a competitor with any of these guys.” At the [...]
Holman Jenkins has a stinging editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “Neutering the ‘Net,” which borrows a term that my friend Randy May coined long ago to describe what net neutrality regulation will ultimately accomplish. What I like best about the Jenkins essay was the way he exposed Free Press for their hypocrisy over [...]
The D.C. Circuit has struck down as arbitrary and capricious the FCC’s “cable cap.” The cap prevented a single cable operator from serving more than 30% of U.S. homes—precisely the same percentage limit struck down by the court in 2001. The court ruled that the FCC had failed to demonstrate that “allowing a cable operator to [...]
The latest edition (Version 4.0) of my PFF special report on “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools & Methods” is now up. For those not familiar with the report, it explores the market for parental control tools, rating schemes, education and media literacy efforts, and various other tools, methods, and initiatives [...]
Continuing the “Cutting the (Video) Cord” series started by my PFF colleague Adam Thierer: The WSJ had two great pieces yesterday about the increasing competitive relevance of television distributed by Internet—a trend that was at the heart of an amicus brief PFF recently filed in support of C omcast’s challenge of the FCC’s 30% cap on cable [...]
This is just a listing of the installments of my ongoing “Media Deconsolidation Series.” I needed to create a single repository of all the essays so I could point back to them in future articles and papers. For those not familiar with it, this series represents an effort to set the record straight regarding the [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
