Industry

Homogeny

Zimran Ahmed and Larry Staton are going back and forth on whether or not the media oligopoly is a bad thing.

Q: Why is media consolidation bad?

Short Answer: Did you watch the Grammy awards? Did you watch CNN the next day? How many counter-arguments have you run across by randomly clicking through the channels?

I didn't think you'd seen any.

Now ask yourself, How many of your friends and family get their news from diverse media?

There may be "no reason [why] a vertically integrated content producer and distributor should exclude rival content or refuse to license it's own content to other distributors," but that doesn't reflect actual behavior: for example, the exclusion of Disney ABC properties from TimeWarner cable systems in 2000. There are significant problems with vertical integration, particularly in this industry. Control over the means of distribution, the pipes, is control over a chokepoint. Or as A. J. Liebling put it, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

While the power may not be exercised, it is there. Consider Microsoft's moves to place itself in a position to extract a percentage of every transaction. Consider also Bill's other business.

The combination of the excessive length of copyright, the DMCA, CBDTPA, the Microsoft settlement, and continued industry consolidation, both in the publishing and telecommunications sectors, indicates a clear danger to society.

Regulation may not be the means to repair or prevent this, but the danger is there.

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper."
--Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

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categories: Industry, Law, Media