A market that is regulated to protect inefficiencies tends to be more costly for consumers and protect approaches that deserve to fail.

Further, your argument does not address the issue of convergence at all. People watch TV and read newspapers on their computers already. What will the regulators say when the nascent dominance becomes overwhelming in fact? Will they say that you can’t own the NY Times web site and the NBC website, but that you can own Yahoo and Google? What’s needed is an overriding principle that makes sense in the modern 21st century context. And like I said, history suggests that while we ought to do what we can to prevent monopolies, oligopolies are far too omnipresent to even try to attack.

The only sensible answer to media consolidation, if you fear it, is to contribute to media outlets that do a better job of producing the sort of content that the main market wants, or to produce great niche content to fill the larger void that is created when consolidation saps some of the variety from the market as it was prior to consolidation. That’s precisely what blogs do, by the way.

I don’t worry that much about media consolidation at this point, because having 3 or 4 politically biased and informationally inadequate national entities isn’t much worse than having 7 or 8 plus a few big market regionals. The one thing I do worry about is where the revenue will come from in the future to fund good independent journalism.

Fortunately, the media really does have its own set of idiosyncratic motivations that preserve the adversarial relationship. If the result of consolidation is Pravda1, Pravda 2, and Pravda3, the market will respond. Just like it responded when you could have any beer you wanted, as long as it was Budweiser. Took awhile, though.

What this ruling stands for is the idea that corporations shouldn’t have that kind of influence on the content creation in a specific market. And let’s face it folks, the reason they FCC ruled this way in the first place is they were lobbied by the media corps to expand what they could own because there’s nothing left. We should have more diversity, not less. Again, I applaud the decision.

And Dos, I like the idea of corporations. Truly. I just just don’t love corporations trying to consolidate entire industries into a few companies. That doesn’t make for a better product, it simply makes for a more homogenized, cost efficient one.

Can a TV station have a website? If they can, then why can’t they have a newspaper?

Can a newspaper have a website? Can this website have video and audio? Does that count as TV? Explain.

I understand the goal here, but 21st century media developments are bulldozing attempts to achieve it using outdated distinctions. Reportage is converging on multimedia presentation, and any regulations which rely on what the primary medium of an entity used to be is just wasting everyone’s time, and maybe messing things up badly by inadvertently picking undeserved favorites.