Economist: Media Ownership Rules Should Be Tech-Neutral
Media ownership regulations should shift to being technology-neutral and recognizing that there is now an "integrated video-distribution market" that includes broadcast, cable and streaming, said International Center for Law & Economics Senior Scholar Eric Fruits in a blog post Wednesday.…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
“Market power should be assessed based on a company’s share of this broader market, not just its dominance within a particular technological segment,” wrote Fruits, who is also an economics professor at Portland State University. “Instead of different rule books for different technologies, we need a unified framework based on competition principles.” This would involve sunsetting legacy rules tied to specific transmission mediums and basing any ownership rules on actual market share across all platforms, he said. “The focus should be on antitrust enforcement, rather than preemptive structural regulations.” If viewers “readily switch among cable, broadcast, and streaming based on content, rather than delivery method, regulations should treat these services as competitive alternatives,” Fruits wrote. Making that shift wouldn’t be simple but would allow “a media landscape in which competition would be waged on a level playing field and where consumers, not regulatory distinctions, determine which services succeed.”