The US certainly takes its media ownership seriously, and after around 18 months of comment taking, studies, peer reviews and criticism, the FCC this week, has amended regulations, in line with a court’s request, allowing newspapers owners to also own the odd TV station or radio station, in one of the leading market areas in the US.
While the last attempt to make such a change was purely political, and appeared to be doing favors for big businesses, allowing companies like News Corp and Viacom to own more and more of US media, this adjustment has been watered down until it makes very little difference to the major players. The fear has always been that a major market could be persuaded, with no dissenting voice, to a particular political view, and shut out political opponents, by a concerted media effort. That’s why the Congress voted some 400 to 20 against putting through such a change under the Bush administration and it had to be put through bundled quietly into an appropriations bill, a move which fell foul of the courts, which in turn squashed it and sent it back to the FCC.
In the end the more important change this week is to put out a notice of future rulemaking to put a curb on the growth of a single cable operator. The newspaper ownership rule was changed so that a newspaper can now own one television station or one radio station in the 20 largest markets, subject to strict limitations. The cable change sets the number of subscribers a cable operator may serve at 30% across all of the US.
Ostensibly this is the same type of rule. Without it one media magnate could become so powerful as to dictate who everyone voted for in the next presidential election. The FCC actually SAID that this is to do with increasing competition in the multichannel video market. If no-one is SO big that their refusal to accept a TV channel can kill off that channel, then the argument goes, it will make for a wider variety of programming.
All this is stuff and nonsense, given that the channels on YouTube are not carried by any cable operator. Also there is no sense here that a combination of cable, and satellite and IPTV services might be limited to 30% of the nation, only cable.
In fact this is an old rule that was challenged by Time Warner Cable through the US courts and needed clarification so the FCC has given it, which is just to re-iterate it.
But the truth is that this is an attempt to put a cap on the 24 million subscribers that Comcast has, while not putting any similar cap on what AT&T or Verizon might achieve in any other type of TV. There is of course plenty of time to cap the TV reach, and market control of AT&T, once it gets its first 1 million IPTV customers. But that’s not true if it goes and buys EchoStar, though presumably the FCC and other government agencies might have a little time for input before allowing such a deal.
While this move isn’t a rule yet, and it doesn’t really affect any cable operator dramatically ‘ Comcast could still acquire another 3 million or so customer homes before falling foul of the rule ‘ it does seem to create an unnecessary hurdle in favor of the US RBOCs and as the variety of networks in the US ‘ cable, IPTV, satellite, digital terrestrial and web ‘ increases, it would appear increasingly unnecessary to have such rules.