Hurricane Katrina showed us we still have far to go. Now people are talking again about full-scale [communications] planning. This time we dare not fail.
If a company bids enough, it can exclude all other competitors, leaving airlines with only one possible supplier and passengers with no choice. Experience shows that if a company has the chance to buy a monopoly license, it will pay a premium for it. That is because it allows them, with one fell swoop, to ensure that competitors will not be able to keep prices down or force them to innovate.
It is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative.
An abuse of the public trust.
Today the Federal Communications Commission empowers America's new media elite with unacceptable levels of influence over the ideas and information upon which our society and our democracy depend.
In a sense, these mergers can also be seen as an epitaph for the competition that many of us thought we would enjoy as a result of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Maybe a better way to put it on this Halloween Day is to say, 'It's not a trick or much of a treat, but it's all you get if you come knocking on the Commission's door today.'
More (conditions) would clearly have been better, ... This is better than approving these mergers without any conditions.
Am I entirely satisfied? No. But this order is now conditioned on provisions designed to address numerous possible harms to competition and to consumers, as well as to protect the openness and innovation that must always characterize the Internet.
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