Change.org Idea: Limit Media Consolidation

At the urging of Arthur Codington, via a post on Facebook, I recently commented on a Change.org idea.

Limit Media Consolidation

We need more voices in the media. Establish policies that limit the number of radio/tv stations one company can own. Create incentives that give voice to perspectives we're not currently hearing in the mainstream media.

My comment is attached here (and on change.org), please go over to the change.org idea to post yours

I am of two minds on this:

1) Government control/regulation of our media has be explicitly designed to encourage consolidation.  The reason why we have to situation we do is because the FCC the Chamber of Commerce and others have created it to be so.  The 1996 Telecommunications act was the catalyst for much of this consolidation.  There is no valid argument that this is good for America.  However, it is good for the few Big Media corps that run the show.

2) The other part of this issues revolves around Network Neutrality.  The media landscape is shifting and the "Internet" (in quotes because it is not the Internet as we know it from YouTube or from our home/office computers) will play a growing role in providing media content.  Big Media is taking the position of an industry that has been disrupted.  They are working tirelessly to beat back the disruption.  They are merging with or buying content owners (Disney, Sony, etc) but they are also buying/merging/aligning communications companies so that Big Media is becoming synonymous with Big Telecommunications.  Already Internet provided by cable companies is considered an "information service" as opposed to a "Telecommunications Service" which means that before the law, the cable companies own not just the pipes the the information flows through but they also own the information.  Network Neutrality legislation would correct this.  While Obama is a staunch Network Neutrality advocate and is constructing an FCC that would favor Net Neutrality, he also signed off on the wire tapping provisions and the Telco immunity provisions of the Bush Administrations FISA act.  The assumption is that he did this because he needs the telcos for "security" purposes and he needs them to respond when he asks to listen in to our conversations.  My assumptions are that Obama will abide by the law requiring congressional oversight of wiretapping but I am troubled by the relationship.

The tie between FISA wire tapping and Network Neutrality centers around the peer to peer Internet and user generated content.  User generated content has been much derided since it's inception in the late 90's when websites began to make the type of thing we are doing here possible.  However, now that the Long Tail business model is king (where an entity can sustainably leverage the Internet to deliver both a very popular and a highly niche piece of content), user generated content has a marketplace; however, Network Neutrality laws are critical to the delivery of niche content. Without Network Neutrality laws it would be perfectly legal for Comcast, at the backbone of the Internet, to favor say Forbes Magazine content over Change.org content causing one set of information to flow more readily than another.  Additionally, the Internet is increasingly moving in to our cell phones and cars and refrigerators.  User generated content will have increasing relevance for disaster relief and response, for disease detection and epidemiology.  The what if for the future is... What if our media/communications infrastructure was designed, explicitly, to support an informed citizenry in every aspect of our lives.

As I have been following these issues I have done some research in to the concept of an Informed Citizenry (no Wikipedia entry).  I was surprised to find that there is no legal precedent that built in the idea of an informed citizenry.  It was an idea that informed the foundation of the US but it did not make it in to the Constitution. I am convinced that this must be the guiding principle of media reform.

One of the primary retorts from Big Media/Telcos is that there is only so much bandwidth.  The reality is, there is only so much bandwidth that they can control.  The Internet is needlessly built on a freeway metaphor where all content goes through a massive "backbone".  The result of this decision is that we have a needlessly centralized infrastructure serving a massively decentralized information network. This has been very good to companies like Cisco whose products manage all the flow of this information and who have written many of the white papers against Network Neutrality.  However, Cisco also understands that a shift to a new type of information routing will be required to run the next Internet.  For my money, the most promising new technology that will enable us to manage information without the bottleneck (and the nexus for NSA wire taps) of the backbone is Network Coding.

Finanlly, I support regulation that limits consolidation, especially if this legistation contains Network Neutrailty provisions and incentives for creating infrastructure and policy that supports long tail content delivery.