[NEC] 2.7: The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality

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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture 

           Published periodically / # 2.7 / June 3, 2003 
        Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
               Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html

In this issue:

 - Introduction
 - Essay: The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality
     (Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/fcc_inequality.html)

* Introduction =======================================================

Quick one today. Though I've been watching the FCC's rule making on
media concentration, I don't have a position that fits easily into the
debate I've seen to date, a debate muddied by a lack of clarity in the
various positions. A good part of this muddiness comes from a false
belief in the possibility of having a media landscape which is
characterized by diversity, freedom, and equality.

This essay is my attempt to clarify what I see as the required
tradeoffs among those three characteristics, and therefore to clarify
the coherent positions.

It is, I recognize, a charmingly naive attempt, since the debate is
mostly populated by people whose stated positions are based on
tactical calculations rather than first principles, but a girl can
dream...

Anyway, here's the essay.

-clay

* Essay ==============================================================

The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequality
  http://www.shirky.com/writings/fcc_inequality.html

Yesterday, the FCC adjusted the restrictions on media ownership,
allowing newspapers to own TV stations, and raising the ownership
limitations on broadcast TV networks by 10%, to 45% from 35%.  It's
not clear whether the effects of the ruling will be catastrophic or
relatively unimportant, and there are smart people on both sides of
that question.  It is also unclear what effect the internet had on the
FCC's ruling, or what role it will play now.

What is clear, however, is a lesson from the weblog world: inequality is
a natural component of media.  For people arguing about an ideal media
landscape, the tradeoffs are clear:  Diverse. Free. Equal.  Pick two.

- The Developing Debate

The debate about media and audience size used to be focussed on the
low total number of outlets, mainly because there were only three
national television networks.  Now that more than 80% of the country
gets their television from cable and satellite, the concern is
concentration. In this view, there may be diverse voices available on
the hundred or more TV channels the average viewer gets, but the value
of that diversity is undone by the fact that large media firms enjoy
the lion's share of the audience's cumulative attention.

A core assumption in this debate is that if media were free of
manipulation, the audience would be more equally distributed, so the
concentration of a large number of viewers by a small number of
outlets is itself evidence of impermissible control.  In this view,
government intervention is required simply to restore the balance we
would expect in an unmanipulated system.

For most of the 20th century, we had no way of testing this
proposition.  The media we had were so heavily regulated and the
outlets so scarce that we had no other scenarios to examine, and the
growth of cable in the last 20 years involved local monopoly of the
wire into the home, so it didn't provide a clean test of an
alternative.

- Weblogs As Media Experiment

In the last few years, however, we have had a clean test, and it's
weblogs.  Weblogs are the freest media the world has ever known.
Within the universe of internet users, the costs of setting up a
weblog are minor, and perhaps more importantly, require no financial
investment, only time, thus greatly weakening the "freedom of the
press for those who can afford one" effect.  Furthermore, there is no
Weblog Central -- you do not need to incorporate your weblog, you do
not need to register your weblog, you do not need to clear your posts
with anyone.  Weblogs are the best attempt we've seen to date of
making freedom of speech and freedom of the press the same freedom, in
Mike Godwin's famous phrase.

And in this free, decentralized, diverse, and popular medium we find
astonishing inequality, inequality so extreme it makes the
distribution of television ratings look flat.  In fact, a review of
any of the weblog tracking initiatives such as http://technorati.com
or the blogging ecosystem project at http://myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/
shows thousand-fold imbalances between the most popular and average
weblogs.  These inequalities often fall into what's known as a power
law distribution, a curve where a tiny number of sites account for a
majority of the in-bound links, while the vast majority of sites have
a very small number of such links.  (Although the correlation with
links and traffic is not perfect, it is a strong proxy for audience
size.)

The reasons for this are complex (I addressed some of them in "Power
Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality" at
http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html), but from the point of
view of analyzing the FCC ruling, the lesson of weblog popularity is
clear: inequality can arise in systems where users are free to make
choices among a large set of options, even in the absence of central
control or manipulation.  Inequality is not a priori evidence of
manipulation, in other words; it can also be a side effect of large
systems governed by popular choice.

In the aftermath of the FCC ruling, and given what we have learned
from the development of weblogs, the debate on media concentration can
now be sharpened to a single question: if inequality is a fact of
life, even in diverse and free systems, what should our reaction be?

- 'Pick Two' Yeilds Three Positions

There are three coherent positions in this debate: The first is
advocacy of free and equal media, which requires strong upper limits
on overall diversity.  This was roughly the situation of the US
broadcast television industry from 1950-1980.  Any viewer was free to
watch shows from any network, but having only three national networks
kept any one of them from becoming dominant.  (Funnily enough,
Gunsmoke, the most popular television show in history, enjoyed a 45%
audience share, the same upper limit now proposed by the FCC for
overall audience size.)

Though this position is logically coherent, the unprecedented
explosion of media choice makes it untenable in practice.  Strong
limits on the number of media outlets accessible by any given member
of the public now only exist in broadcast radio and newspapers, not
coincidently the two media least affected by new technologies of
distribution.

The second coherent position is advocacy of diverse and equal media,
which requires constraints on freedom.  This view is the media
equivalent of redistributive taxation, where an imbalance in audience
size is seen as being so corrosive of democratic values that steps
must be taken to limit the upper reach of popular media outlets, and
to subsidize in some way less popular ones.  In practice, this
position is advocacy of diverse and less unequal media.  This is the
position taken by the FCC, who yesterday altered regulations rather
than removing them.  (There can obviously be strong disagreement
within this group about the kind and degree of regulations.)

People who hold this view believe that regulation is preferable to
inequality, and will advocate governmental intervention in any market
where the scarcity in the number of channels constrains number of
outlets the locals have access to (again, radio and newspapers are the
media with the most extreme current constraints.)

More problematic for people who hold this view are unequal but
unconstrained media such as weblogs.  As weblogs grow in importance,
we can expect at least some members of the "diverse and equal" camp to
advocate regulation of weblogs, on the grounds that the imbalance
between Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit.com and J. Random Blogger is no
different than the imbalance between Clear Channel and WFMU.  This fight
will pit those who advocate government intervention only where there
is scarcity (whether regulatory or real) vs. those who advocate
regulation wherever there is inequality, even if it arises naturally
and in an unconstrained system.

The third coherent position is advocacy of diverse and free media,
which requires abandonment of equality as a goal.  For this camp, the
removal of regulation is desirable in and of itself, whatever the
outcome.  Given the evidence that diverse and free systems migrate to
unequal distributions, the fact of inequality is a necessarily
acceptable outcome to this group.  However, in truly diverse systems,
with millions of choices rather than hundreds, the imbalance between
popular and average media outlets is tempered by the imbalance between
the most popular outlets and the size of the system as a whole.  As
popular as Glenn Reynolds may be, InstaPundit is no Gunsmoke.  No
matter how large the weblog world grows, no one weblog is going to
reach 45% of the audience.  In large diverse systems, freedom
increases the inequality between outlets, but the overall size and
growth weakens the effects of concentration.

This view is the least tested in practice.  While the "diverse and
equal" camp is advocating regulation and therefore an articulation of
the status quo, people who believe that our goals should be diversity
and freedom and damn the consequences haven't had much effect on the
traditional media landscape to date, so we have very little evidence
on the practical effect of their proposals.  The most obvious goal for
this group is radical expansion of media choice in all dimensions, and
a subsequent dropping of all mandated restrictions.  For this view to
come to pass, restrictions on internet broadcast of radio and TV
should be dropped, web radio stations must live in the same copyright
regime broadcast stations do, much more unlicensed spectrum must be
made available, and so on.

And this the big risk.  Though the FCC's ruling is portrayed as
deregulation, it is nothing of the sort.  It is simply different
regulation, and it adjusts percentages within a system of scarcity,
rather than undoing the scarcity itself.  It remains to be seen if the
people supporting the FCC's current action are willing to go all the
way to the weblogization of everything, but this is what will be
required to get to the benefits of the free and diverse scenario.  In
the absence of regulation, the only defense against monopolization is
to create a world where, no matter how many media outlets a single
company can buy, more can appear tomorrow. The alternative --
reduction of regulation without radical expansion -- is potentially
the worst of both worlds.

The one incoherent view is the belief that a free and diverse media
will naturally tend towards equality.  The development of weblogs in
their first five years demonstrates that is not always true, and gives
us reason to suspect it many never be true.  Equality can only be
guaranteed by limiting either diversity or freedom.

The best thing that could come from the lesson of weblog popularity
would be an abandoning of the idea that there will ever be an
unconstrained but egalitarian media utopia, a realization ideally
followed by a more pragmatic discussion between the "diverse and free"
and "diverse and equal" camps.

-=-

* End ====================================================================

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2003, Clay Shirky