Yesterday I spoke at a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children conference entitled “A Dialog on Social Networking Web Sites.” It featured dozens of industry, technology, law enforcement and government experts discussing how to protect children on social networking sites. I spoke on the final panel of the day on “The Public Policy Challenges of Social Networking” and was up against two state AGs: Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. They both favored various regulatory measures to address concerns about online safety, including a complete ban on anyone under the age of 16 on social networking websites.
My response follows.
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FCC Chairman Martin’s push to impose “multicast” must-carry rules on cable providers looked like a done deal only a few days ago. Martin had made the the new mandate a priority, and with two new Republican members of the commission sworn in, its looked like Martin would certainly be able to get a majority to support him. He had even scheduled a vote for Wednesday, usually a sure sign that the votes were in the bag.
As it turned out, however, the bag was empty. The reason: Robert McDowell, who joined the commission only three weeks ago, said “no.” According to National Journal, sources said that McDowell “sees much benefit from the cable industry voluntarily agreeing to carry broadcasters’ multicasts and prefers a private sector solution.” Moreover, he was said to be unsure of the legality of the proposed regulation. Since the two Democrats apparently also opposed the move, that left Martin without a majority.
Hooray for the new guy. Forcing cable companies to carry multiple TV signals from each broadcaster over their systems is a bad idea. First, consumers would be worse off, since these channels would displace other channels consumers presumably prefer. (Note that cable firms actually pay broadcasters for the right to carry channels that are popular. By definition, we are talking about the unpopular ones here).
Moreover, the rules would violate the constitution. By actual count, multi-cast must-carry likely violates two amendments–the fifth amendment (taking of property) and the first (free speech). Do the math. That’s 20 percent of the bill of rights. Pretty good for one regulation. They might as well add in something about quartering troops and go for a trifecta.
Commissioner McDowell, you were right to block this. Welcome to the FCC, by the way. Glad to have you aboard.
This morning, CBS announced it had reached a final agreement with Dan Rather terminating his contract and his 44-year relationship with that network. When reports of the impending break-up came of few days ago, the public reaction was surprise. Not surprise that he was leaving, but surprise that he was still around at all. It seems that since he left the anchor’s chair, Rather fell victim to forgotten-but-not-gone syndrome. Although still part of the 60 Minutes CBS team, his output was slight, with fewer shows airing than any other anchor there.
It wasn’t the ending Rather wanted. As I wrote two years ago, Rather aspired to Walter Cronkite status. Cronkite, Rather’s predecessor at CBS, was a national icon, a kindly figure who the nation looked up to. Rather never achieved that status. Not only was he a bit too eccentric, and openly ideological –but the role of broadcast anchor itself became more and more irrelevant during Rather’s tenure.
Rather’s final downfall was swift, being caught reporting as news–then defending beyond all reason–clearly forged documents pertaining to George Bush. There was no good excuse for his behavior–either he was actively involved in a fraud, or (perhaps even more damning given his self-image as a crack journalist) he failed as a reporter. As Rather himself might have put it, he was beaten like a rented mule. CBS, after a decent interval, gently pushed him out of Cronkites’ chair.
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Matt Yglesias channels Adam Thierer:
the media’s become less concentrated. They’re up to six giants from just four–General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that’s six.
Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.
What’s more, the curious thing about these six media monopolists is that between them they control zero of America’s most-influential newspapers. Nobody, I hope, will deny that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are important elements of the media. And yet, they’re owned by three separate companies, each of them apart from the Big Six. Beyond the Big Six electronic media companies and the Big Three newspapers, there’s also Gannett which owns the high-circulation USA Today along with a boatload of smaller newspapers. And then there’s Tribune Media with The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other papers.
He notes that PBS and NPR offer credible alternatives to the mainstream media. And on top of all that, the Internet is rapidly expanding peoples’ access to the world’s media sources. And it’s easy to multiply these examples. Matt doesn’t mention C-SPAN, the Economist, political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect and Reason, or radio talk shows–yet these too are all ways for viewers to get access to news and information.
In short, there’s more news and information available, from more different perspectives, in more different formats, than any one person could hope to consume–even if you live in the middle of nowhere. The reason that the Big Six have the market share they do, I suspect, is the same reason that Coke and Pepsi command the lion’s share of the beverage market: they cater toward mainstream tastes and so manage to meet the needs of the vast majority of ordinary viewers. For all the bitching that ordinary voters do about the mainstream media, most of them continue to watch it, despite the availability of many, many alternatives.
James Pinkerton predicts the rise of the “state owned mainstream media.” He points out that ever-increasing pressures on the margins of traditional media outlets like CNN and the New York Times will create a void that will be filled with government-run media sources like the BBC, NPR, and Voice of America:
This is the future of media: Some elements of the MSM will survive, probably. Bloggers will thrive, of course, but 99.9 percent of them are amateurs, without so many as one full-time employee. What will survive and thrive for sure, however, is the SOMSM. Every country with ambitions on the international stage will soon have its own state-supported media.
If war is too important to be left to generals, then news is too important to be left to reporters. Governments, including ours, have their own ideas, and they want to share them with us, the people–like it or not.
In addition, around the world, states will want to “help” their media. Not satisfied with what the free market is bringing about, politicians will offer to help out the invisible hand–help it, that is, with their own iron fist.
This strikes me as silly. Pinkerton’s actually wrong about bloggers–the percentage of amateur bloggers is much higher than 99.9 percent. But then there are more than 40 million blogs in the world, so even if only a tiny fraction of them are professionals, that still leaves plenty of room for high-quality reporting. Some bloggers (like me) are lucky enough to have jobs that allow blogging on the side. Others, such as Andrew Sullivan, have become successful enough that they generate enough ad revenue, speaking fees, etc to support themselves as full-time bloggers. Others, such as the writers of political magazines like Reason and The American Prospect blog as part of their day jobs. And still other blogs, such as Slashdot have become successful, ad-supported commercial news outlets with full-time staffs.
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Next week, the FCC may revisit the issue of whether cable providers will be required to carry every channel of programming transmitted by over the air broadcasters. “Must-carry” itself is not a new idea–for years cable systems have been forced to carry broadcast signals over their networks. When broadcasters switch to digital transmission, however, each will be able to transmit multiple channels over the same bit of spectrum. So, should cable firms be required to carry each and every one of these channels? The FCC said “no” to such multicast must-carry rules a few years ago. But that was under Chairman Michael Powell. Current chairman Kevin Martin feels differently about “multi-cast must-carry,” and may now have the votes to reverse the prior decision. (More on the issue here.)
This week, he got support for this expanded regulation from an unlikely source: AT&T. AT&T, you may remember, has in recent months been exhaustively making the case against another set of rules–neutrality regulation. The federal government should keep its paws off private networks, they (rightly) argued, warning that they would discourage needed investment in private networks. However, this week a spokesman said that, regarding must-carry, it had no objection to federal paws. “We’re more than happy to put this programming on our network,” he said. “We support multicast must-carry.”
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Each week seems to bring another exuse for me to pen an entry in my ongoing “Media DE-Consolidation” series. This week it’s the Tribune Co. According to a front-page story in today’s Wall Street Journal, the 160-year-old media / newspaper giant is considering spinning off its broadcasting group, which includes 26 TV stations (including my beloved WGN-TV in Chicago on which I watched countless Cubs games growing up). I find this interesting for two reasons:
(1) Most newspaper owners are making a push for the FCC to relax the newspaper-broadcasting cross-ownership rule so they can own both papers and stations in the same market. But this move by Tribune would signal a retreat by a major company in the opposite direction. So perhaps this will take the steam out of the dereg effort at the FCC.
(2) However, let’s not forget that the Tribune Co. long ago received waivers to hold papers and stations in key markets such as Chicago and Los Angeles and the resulting combinations certainly haven’t done anything to negatively impact media diversity in those towns. So, it’s difficult to see what harm would come from allowing others to combine newspaper and broadcasting operations.
Regardless, the push for media DE-consolidation continues and the Chicken Little media critics are nowhere to be found. Any time an operator even mentions the idea of buying more properties, the media critics go bananas and scream for government regulation. But when major operators start spinning off entire divisions, the critics don’t say a peep. They fail to appreciate how dynamic media markets are and how investors, consumers and technological change is the greatest check on market power, not ham-handed government regulations.
I’ve been spending most of my time blogging about First Amendment-related issues in recent months and have failed to cover media marketplace / ownership developments. Specifically, I haven’t kept up with my ongoing “Media DE-consolidation series,” which has highlighted downsizing or spin-offs at several companies, including: Knight-Ridder, Viacom, Disney, Clear Channel, and many others.
As part of this series, I’ve previously written about Time Warner’s potential coming crack-up, but now it appears imminent. In an amazing front page story in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes declares the death of “synergy.” More poignantly, Bewkes goes so far as to call synergy “bull—t”!
And so it appears that the biggest media mega-merger of all-time–and a deal that had hoards of Chicken Little critics declaring it represented “Big Brother,” “the end of the independent press,” and a harbinger of a “new totalitarianism”–is set to unravel.
What are we to make of this?
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I’m lucky enough to live in an area where broadband competition is rapidly intensifying–Fairfax County in Northern Virginia (McLean, VA to be exact). In recent years, the incumbent cable operator Cox Communications has beefed-up its network to offer phone service and high-speed broadband in addition to its growing video programming lineup (which how includes plenty of HDTV and VOD offerings). I’ve been a Cox cable subscriber for many years now and have been very happy with them. In fact, after 7 years with DirecTV prior to that, I’ve never thought about going back to satellite after switching to cable. (Of course, the superior high-speed broadband option that Cox offers had something to do with that.)
Meanwhile, regional telephone giant Verizon Communications has been aggressively deploying new fiber optic lines throughout many Northern Virginia neighborhoods and other Washington, D.C. metro communities in the hope of competing against Cox and Comcast in the race to deliver the complete “triple play” package (voice, video, data) to consumers. Last year, Verizon sent a team of contractors out to my neighborhood to dig up my front yard, lay new fiber lines and install a new box. And then, for reasons I still can’t quite understand, another team came back and dug up my yard again to install more lines and a different box! My wife wasn’t real happy about the mess this created (and all the grass that died as a result), but I just kept telling her that one day it would all be worth it.
And that day has arrived.
Earlier this year, Verizon began dispatching door-to-door salespeople to my neighborhood in an attempt to sign up new subscribers for their new “FIOS” (fiber optic-based) service. I felt sorry for the salespeople who knocked on my door because they had no idea I was going to shower them with a litany of technical questions based on my knowledge of communications markets. But they were always very informative and helpful. And they REALLY wanted my business. Unfortunately, however, they had no control over the pesky city and county regulators who were holding up deployment of FIOS service in the area. In particular, Verzion had to fight for the right to offer consumers video programming services in competition with cable.
Luckily for me, they finally got permission in Fairfax County. (Of course, Verizon and other telcos are still fighting for permission to offer video services in countless other communities across America. And federal legislation is pending that would expedite that process through the use of national franchises). After I received confirmation that Verizon would at least be able to offer me everything I already had in my Cox “triple play” bundle, I finally decided to pull the trigger and sign up for a one-month trial of Verizon’s FIOS service in my home.
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As I’ve written before, America’s increasingly heavy-handed, anti-free speech campaign finance laws threaten to eventually ensnare the entire Internet and our new innovative, bottom-up world of organic “we-dia” (WE-MEDIA). Blogs are already in their crosshairs and lawmakers will be targeting other technologies of freedom in coming years.
Want to know where we might be headed? Look at Singapore. They’ve got a long history of stifling political speech and now their drawing up a blueprint to quash dissent via alternative digital outlets.
Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Communications, Information and the Arts (and you thought the FCC was bad!) recently said that “Anyone, anywhere can blog anything, anyhow. We have adopted a light touch approach in dealing with the everyday use of the Internet.” Well, that sounds encouraging, but then… “However, during the election period when such free-for-all may result in undesirable situations, we cannot take a completely hands-off approach,” he said. “We will review our policies on the Internet and new media during the election period bearing in mind the changes taking place.”
According to this AFP story, Singapore has already been criticized by human rights groups and opposition parties for placing restrictions on political discussions on the Internet. The rules apparently already ban the use of use of podcasts and videocasts for advertising during elections.
Whether or not this all works remains to be seen. It’s one thing to regulate the signals being beamed out from a big broadcast tower. (After all, it’s pretty easy to find those towers and their programmers). Internet “broadcasters” are another matter, however, and enforcement will become a nightmare for the regulators as more and more people get online.
But that doesn’t mean the regulators won’t give it their best shot. And while lawmakers here in the States have given blogs and the Internet a reprieve for now, you’d be fooling yourself to believe that that’s the end of the story. Regulation expands. Always and everywhere.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.