The New Telecom Oligarchs | The Nation

I had a front-row seat, from 2001 until 2012, witnessing the reconfiguration of our communications ecosystem. It is no secret that I found myself very often on the dissenting end of the regnant regulatory theory of the times. That theory was an odd mix of the free market’s “invisible hand” resolving all problems combined with an overlay of deregulatory hubris that took great liberties with the communications law of the land. Not even the Telecommunications Act of 1996 envisioned Ma Bell and Ma Cell as its outcome. The FCC went on to exempt the new world of broadband from just about all of the competitive and consumer-protection safeguards that had applied for years to telecommunications. No, the FCC majority stubbornly insisted, broadband wasn’t telecommunications; it was an “information service.” So they moved it into an unrelated and ambiguous section of the statute, where it could remain untouched by consumer protection, privacy and public safety provisions.

We became the only country on earth that short-circuited broadband development through a tedious, mistaken and totally unnecessary exercise in linguistic analysis. And we have paid for it dearly. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development currently ranks the United States fifteenth in the world in getting broadband out to all our people. Other ratings place us even further down in the rankings. It really doesn’t matter if we are tenth or fifteenth or twentieth; if America is going to dig itself out of the deep hole we are in, we need to be in the broadband vanguard—not so we can pin a gold medal on our chest, but to create jobs, foster competition and open the doors of opportunity to every American.

Susan Crawford knowingly dissects other aspects of the rationale behind these wrongheaded decisions. For one, there was a theory of “convergence,” premised on the belief that different communications sectors—telephone, cable, wireless, satellite, even electric power lines—would compete against one another to provide broadband across the land, thereby preserving competition and lowering consumer costs. It wasn’t companies that would compete against one another so much as technologies. The problem with this theory is that the companies were all becoming broadband enterprises, crossing the boundaries that supposedly separated technologies and making a mockery of so-called “intermodal” competition. Not only did firms within sectors continue to combine, but companies started buying one another across the imagined technology boundaries. The mega-combines that emerged found ways to avoid competition in specific markets, creating virtual (and sometimes actual) monopoly power. And they learned how to cherry-pick areas that could afford to pay for the kind of low-calorie broadband they were willing to deploy. So it should not have come as a huge surprise when Comcast made a play for the whole shooting match. It wasn’t just that our policies made this merger possible. Our policies made it inevitable.

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Apparently, the merger has worked well for Comcast. Just a few weeks ago, the telecom-broadband-media behemoth announced its intention to acquire the remaining 49 percent of NBCU from General Electric for $16.7 billion. Most analysts had predicted this would happen eventually, but “eventually” came at a speed that surprised even industry analysts. ‘Twas a good day for shareholders, but considerably less so for cable customers paying for sports programming, rural Americans still without access to high-speed broadband, and journalists wondering whatever happened to support for their jobs and their craft. Looking back, I now understand why neither Comcast nor the commission ever claimed that consumers would receive lower cable rates as a result of all the “efficiencies” and “economies” the transaction was going to bring about. Comcast had other plans for those savings. In time, we will discover—and pay for—the other consequences of this merger.

Captive Audience held this reader captive from beginning to end. The broad themes make for compelling reading, but the entertainment value is in plots and subplots worthy of a thriller. Crawford also has a flair for making even difficult material understandable. Anyone who can make a page or so of easy reading from something as arcane yet important as telephone pole attachments should be up for a writers’ prize of some sort.

I hope that in Crawford’s next book she will turn her jeweler’s eye to the damage that media consolidation and misguided regulatory policies have inflicted on our democracy and civic dialogue. That’s a part of the story she tells in Captive Audience, but it deserves her separate attention. Those “efficiencies” and “economies of scale” that the Wall Street crowd keeps pushing Big Media to achieve through its many mergers have led to the shuttering of hundreds of newsrooms and the firing of thousands of reporters. Investigative journalism hangs by the slenderest of threads, and we have been consigned—or condemned—to a news and information environment in which glitzy infotainment replaces hard news, opinion masquerades as fact, spin supplants substance, and thousands of stories that could hold the powerful accountable go unreported. An informed citizenry is the prerequisite of self-government. Without vibrant media that dig for facts and tell truth to the American people, we don’t have a shot at resolving the many challenges our country confronts. It is not only an audience that’s being held captive—it is our democracy, too.