Salon on the FCC - "Can the Web beat Big Media?"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Mohammad Al-Ubaydli <mo () mo md>
Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 07:53:29 -0400
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Salon on the FCC - "Can the Web beat Big Media?"

Dear Dave,
for the IP List?

<http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/05/21/web_vs_big_media/index.html>

May 21, 2003  |  Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, is an anachronism. The things he enjoys -- deregulation and new
technology -- are icons of a bygone era, a gilded age that long ago lost its
luster. But Powell remains a believer; in just about every speech he makes,
he extols the virtues of the Internet or cellphones or Wi-Fi or TiVo.

"Something really different has happened, and it is more than an
aberration," Powell said in a speech in late April. "We have, I think,
witnessed the arrival of something new -- a defining tenet around which to
organize our thinking, our industrial activity, and our conception of the
public interest. It is technology -- not classic economics, not political
science, not law, but physics, biology and chemistry." The rhetoric is not
unlike much of what we heard on CNBC in 1999: The world has changed. The old
rules no longer matter. Let's get rid of them.

The rules Powell has been itching to scrap are those that place ownership
limits on companies that own newspapers and television stations. To ensure
that a few companies don't control all of the nation's news and
entertainment, the FCC has long capped the number of outlets a single media
firm can own both nationally and in local markets. But Powell thinks the
regulations are outdated. He says that current restrictions don't take into
account technological improvements in media delivery -- such as cable and
satellite TV and the Internet -- that have allowed many more sources of
information to enter our homes.

On June 2, Powell and the four other FCC commissioners will vote on a plan
to significantly loosen the rules, allowing the country's largest newspaper
and TV companies to greatly increase the number of outlets they own. The
commission's three Republican appointees (including Powell) are expected to
vote in favor of the proposal, ensuring its passage.

Critics of the plan fear that it will lead to an ever more concentrated
media world, one in which much of what we see, hear and read is controlled
by a handful of mega-corporations. "I think we could give a significant shot
in the arm to further consolidation in an industry that has [already]
undergone significant consolidation" in the last few years, says Michael
Copps, one of the two Democrats on the commission. "I don't think we
understand quite how significantly the industry has been altered and we
haven't projected out what further consolidation will mean. We don't know
where we are and we don't know where we're going."

But Powell's argument that technology will free us from the grip of media
oligarchs is, at least at first, an intriguing and attractive claim. He is
not obviously wrong. During the past decade, at the same time that TV, radio
and the newspapers have become the domain of a cozy club of barons, we've
seen the Web grow into a serious rival to the traditional media, providing
ordinary Americans with news sources from which they'd long been cut off. As
recently as the 1980s, someone in middle America would get news from fewer
than a half dozen services -- the three broadcast networks, a newspaper and
maybe a local radio station.

Everything's different now. Now we drown in media: the hundreds of channels
on our televisions, all the world's newspapers at our fingertips, Web-only
publications like this one, the millions of songs on peer-to-peer networks,
and blog after blog after blog of bloviation, all of it always on, always
buzzing, inescapable. And these new media have made an impact on the real
world. The Web now routinely mobilizes people who don't enjoy much access to
traditional outlets (think of the antiwar movement, to name one of many
online campaigns), and it was pivotal to the impeachment of a president and
the downfall of a Senate majority leader.

So, given the power of the technology, one may reasonably ask: What harm can
come of Powell's plan to let the big guys get bigger if the rest of us, the
little guys with laptops and Wi-Fi, can simply steer around the monopolies?

But when you set out to answer that question, it's hard to find anyone in
the media world -- aside from interested parties -- who can furnish serious
proof that new technologies are shaking the foundations beneath the
entrenched media giants. If anything, the Web and cable and satellite have
expanded the reach of media conglomerates. Ninety percent of the top 50
cable channels are owned by media giants. Every single one of the top 20
news Web sites is under the thumb of a media giant.

It's true that the Web has allowed unprecedented diversity in media, and
simply looking at the most popular Web sites doesn't quite capture the broad
range of views the medium allows. Folks who congregate at sites like
Indymedia, on the left, and Free Republic, on the right, were essentially
out in the cold in those lonely pre-Net days.

But regardless of the platform, the most popular content remains in the keep
of a small and shrinking bunch. Why is this so? The answer is obvious, say
critics of deregulation: A firm that owns a great swath of the traditional
media has phenomenal leverage on new platforms. A Web site may be great --
but it becomes even greater, and only really valuable, when you also own TV
stations and newspapers, a situation that Powell's rules will exacerbate.
"Having a lot of people jumping around with Web sites doesn't prove that a
monopoly doesn't have power," says Robert McChesney, a media scholar at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "If in fact the growth of all
these Web sites and cable channels and satellite radio and blogs and instant
messaging -- if it meant that owning a TV station didn't give you any power,
why would people be spending $300 million buying a TV station when they
could build a hundred Web sites instead?" Why? Because TV still matters.
Newspapers still matter. And the Web, while it's growing in importance, is
still no match.

<snip>

Article goes on for another two pages.

<http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/05/21/web_vs_big_media/index.html>

mohammad

Dr Mohammad Al-Ubaydli
e mo () mo md
w www.mo.md


------ End of Forwarded Message

-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/