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"Experts on media deregulation"
09/25/2003 Entry
[I am now posting entries at Crooked Timber. See this post - including follow-up comments - there.]
Despite some worries that Hurricane Isabel may wash away TPRC, it was held this past weekend in Arlington, VA and lived up to its reputation as a wonderful meeting for those interested in various communications policy issues. It is the only conference I have attended consistently without fail since I first showed up there five years ago. It is always held in the DC area to ensure a good turnout from government representatives (or I’m assuming that’s a reason for its location).
It’s a good conference for the following reasons:
1. high quality of papers (this year’s acceptance rate was around 25%)
2. a relatively small and friendly group that has been getting together for years but is also very open to meeting new participants
3. a great mix of people from government (mostly the FCC but others as well), the private sector (fewer reps now than a couple of years ago) and academia (mostly economists and legal scholars but various other social scientists and some others as well)
Not surprisingly, the issue of media deregulation came up throughout the conference. There was a lunch-time debate between Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project and Randolph May of the Progress & Freedom Foundation about this. A point Andy Schwartzman kept bringing up was that now with the availability of so much information on the Internet, there should be less concern about what is available via other media.
This is a point that has come up numerous times during discussions about media deregulation in the past few months as well. But there are problems with this approach. Some of the biggest news sources online are just replicas of more traditional news sources. CNN, ABC, NBC are some of the largest online players for news. You could argue that if that’s where people prefer to get information then so be it. However, it would be hard to argue that people’s actions simply reflect their preferences. Work I have done shows that many people lack the necessary skills to find anything and everything on the Web. So even though lots of material is available, it is not necessarily realistically accessible to many. Moreover, given the way content is organized online - the way ISPs and big portals feature some content more prominently than other content - not all Web pages are created equal regardless of their quality.
Related to this issue was an especially intriguing presentation by Eli Noam on the increasing market concentration in the Internet sector. His work finds that the Internet sector is more concentrated than other media industries. Unfortunately, the paper does not offer details about methodology (e.g. what exactly counts for Internet sector in his analyses), but he seems to be writing a related book so hopefully there will be more information available on this.
Overall, it was good to see that representatives from the FCC did not seem to take for granted the Internet’s role in bringing diversity of opinion to the masses.
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