“Monopoly” in a Media-Saturated World

by on February 8, 2010 · 4 comments

So the proposed Comcast/NBC merger was met with “skepticism” by Washington politicians. Will Comcast charge for content that was once free? Will it ensure that emergency programming gets through? These services and decisions about them are normal offerings that a concerned public expects; a merged entity ignores them at its peril.

The two firms’ CEOs respectively made assurances to lawmakers like 18-term term Chairman Henry Waxman. (Speaking of the lack of choice, this gentleman’s own constituents get to vote for him, but none of the rest of us have any say whatsoever–decade after decade–even though his laws impact us all).

But those assurances about programming aren’t what politicians care about, not really. This proceeding serves to help re-energize the old political campaign against what politicians laughably call “media consolidation.” (Here’s one of my defenses of so-called “media monopoly” in Communications Lawyer so no need to repeat it here now; I’m not an attorney but I play one at a think tank.)

Any antitrust intervention that relieves Comcast/NBC’s competitors of critical market impulses, of the driving need to respond to any potentially new superior service or slate of services, hurts the interests of consumers. These endless proceedings and delays–and before this one, those of Echostar/DirecTV, Sirius/XM and others–all directly harm consumer interests and the communications marketplace. There is too much tolerance of pointless FCC and Congressional interference in today’s media-saturated world, and too much tolerance of media competitors who properly should have no say whatsoever in whether or not a rival’s merger goes forward.

Basically, antitrust is about dismantling what others have created or hope to create, undermining large scale voluntarism and enterprise, and replacing it with even larger scale compulsion or prohibition. The (not “unintended,” as often claimed) result of this is to send the “free” market careening off into a direction it never would have taken, a direction in defiance of shareholder capitalism and market pressures. I wrote about this very problem in a letter in the Wall Street Journal last week.

The emergence of ever-greater competitive alternatives on the media horizon will be damaged by the destruction of wealth entailed in halting a productive merger. The merger, if it goes through, may or may not prove successful for the companies themselves. Regardless, it is precisely the market’s task to respond to this and future deals competitively, not leverage Washington to avoid having to engineer and sweat over such a response. To those rivals that might feel satisfaction at the barriers and future conditions put on this merger if it’s even “approved” (how is that even a term appropriate to free enterprise?): Political disapproval of Comcast/NBC makes it even easier to put others in the crosshairs next time.

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Wayne Crews / Wayne Crews is vice president for policy and director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He started the Dysfunction Network as a side project. He is a dad of four. Wayne's work explores the impact of government regulation of private activity: Areas of interest include antitrust and competition policy, safety and environmental issues, and information age concerns like privacy, online security, broadband policy, and intellectual property. Wayne is the author of the yearly report, Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, and he co-authored the recent reports This Liberal Congress Went to Market? a Bipartisan Policy Agenda for the 110th Congress and Communications without Commissions: A National Plan for Reforming Telecom Regulation. Prior to the assorted government bailouts now taking place, he wrote the report Still Stimulating Like It’s 1999: Time to Rethink Bipartisan Collusion on Economic Stimulus Packages. Wayne is co-editor of the books Who Rules the Net: Internet Governance and Jurisdiction (2003) and Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property In the Information Age (2002). He is co-author of What’s Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism (2003), and a contributing author to others. He has published in the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Communications Lawyer, the International Herald Tribune and others. He has made various TV appearances on Fox, CNN, ABC, CNBC and the Lehrer NewsHour, and his regulatory reform ideas have been featured prominently in such publications as the Washington Post, Forbes and Investor’s Business Daily. He is frequently invited to speak, and has testified before congressional committees on various issues. Earlier Wayne was a legislative aide in the United States Senate to Sen. Phil Gramm, covering regulatory and welfare reform issues. He was an Economist and Policy Analyst at Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, and has worked as an economist at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and as a Research Assistant at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. He holds an M.B.A. from William and Mary and a B.S. from Lander College in Greenwood, South Carolina. He was a candidate for state senate as a libertarian while at Lander.

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