Wednesday, February 21, 2007 |
Tech: Satellite Of Love, Part 2
Federal regulators are notoriously slow to act, yet it took Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin less than half a day to erect a daunting roadblock to the proposed merger of the country's two satellite radio services, XM and Sirius. Within hours of the companies' announcement of their intention to combine operations, Martin issued a statement saying that XM and Sirius "would need to demonstrate that consumers would clearly be better off with both more choice and affordable prices."Whoa. Forgotten in all this is the fact that the FCC's restrictions on use of this bandwidth amount to a kind of tacit kingmaker power. The market may be "hotly competitive" in some broad sense, but certainly it isn't even remotely true for satellite broadcast....
Martin's statement is inconsistent with the approach the FCC has taken on media consolidation in general. The goal should be to promote choice not in the niche occupied by XM and Sirius, but in the general market of audio entertainment. As Martin and other Republicans on the FCC have often noted, technology is enabling consumers to get radio programming and on-demand audio services in a variety of new ways. That makes the overall market hotly competitive, particularly among national players.
Further, it's not even clear that the government is doing everything it can to make terrestrial broadcast competitive. Whether it's the FCC using rulemaking processes to bully low-power FM (which has never really been allowed in truly major markets) or Congress itself threatening traditional fair use rights on the digital broadcasters so often trotted out as an example of competition, the federal government is all too frequently acting like a hired hand of the incumbent protected broadcasters and not as a neutral custodian of the airwaves whose function is to prevent interference. With modern technology, there's no reason why the every single channel on the radio dial couldn't be put to use with no ill effect to the major broadcasters. Allow the merger? Sure, whatever. Just don't pretend that the radio market is anything like "competitive". Congress has seen to that.
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