It’s Time for a ‘Clean Slate’ for Broadcast-Media Rules
ICLE Senior Scholar Eric Fruits was featured in a Law360 article covering his analysis of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) outdated media-ownership regulations. Drawing from his Truth on the Market blog post, Fruits argues that the current rules are an anachronism and that, were broadcasting invented today, it would be governed by general competition principles rather than by the current complex and restrictive framework.
“The thought experiment of inventing broadcasting today leads to a clear conclusion: the regulatory structure that governs the industry is an anachronism,” wrote Eric Fruits, ICLE senior scholar. “We would not allocate vast amounts of high-value spectrum to broadcasting at no charge. We would not impose arbitrary ownership caps or vague public-interest obligations.”
Fruits also argued that in such a scenario, “we would not create a complex and coercive carriage regime like must carry and retransmission consent,” referring to program carriage rules that require cable and satellite providers to carry local broadcasters’ TV channels. “Instead, we would treat broadcasting like any other technology for content distribution.”
Read the full article here.