Why the Government Should Always Keep Its Hands Off Media

The news that the Trump administration is suing to block the merger of AT& T and Time Warner - presumably stemming from Trump's pique over CNN's truthful reporting of news about Trump, which he deems to be "fake news" (CNN has long been part of Time Warner) - is unsurprising, and sadly demonstrates a point I've been making for decades: the government should keep its hands entirely off media, including not bringing to bear anti-trust laws.

I was never much in favor of anti-trust laws, anyway - the marketplace is a better regulator of business than the government - but when applied to businesses that have nothing or not much to do with communication, they are not unconstitutional.   In the case of media, any attempt to regulate - whether its content, its corporate structure, any aspect of media - is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, and its provision that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

And even when well-intended, such anti-trust laws are unnecessary when applied to media.  As I argued in my 1998 article in The Industry Standard - "Leave Poor Microsoft Alone" (not my title) - all the handwringing over Microsoft dominating the personal computing industry back then was not needed, and ignorant of media evolution.   As I point out in my Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media, history has shown that we humans bend media to what we want as consumers, not what corporations may try to dictate.  And sure enough, as the hue-and-cry against Microsoft in the late 1990s was reaching a crescendo, Apple was already on the way to staging a comeback with their rehire of Steve Jobs - a comeback which reversed the dominance of Microsoft, and left Apple in the powerful position it still has today.

The bottom line of all this is the Founding Fathers were right in what they put in the First Amendment.  For democracy to function well, government should have zero control of media - zero, whether Trump, Clinton, Obama, anyone in between.  (Which, by the way, is why I'm also no fan of so-called net neutrality.)

NBC and Apple Split: Much Ado About Nothing

Much hand wringing, phosphor, and ink over the news that NBC shows won't be for sale any more on iTunes. According to Apple, that's because it didn't want to go along with an NBC price hike that would have raised the per-episode download price to consumers from $1.99 to $4.99...

But, you know what? They're both wrong. NBC's wrong, sure, for wanting to get more money for its downloaded shows, but iTunes and NBC were both wrong, in the first place, for even the $1.95 charge.

Most people already know that that you can see episodes of most major shows for free, on the NBC or whatever network's web site - not to mention bittorent and all the rest.

The world of television consumption is changing, almost by the minute, and it's going in the direction of people watching whatever they want, when they want, and not paying for it. Actually, there's probably a shorter distance between this and traditional free television in your living room than download and pay.

NBC and Apple are usually ahead of the pack in understanding this. Maybe NBC does understand this, and wants to drive more viewers to its own site.

But whatever the reasoning, it's a safe bet that corporate, profit-per-item mentality is a stubborn old bird, and doesn't die easily, even in the digital age.