>In his remarks Thursday, Pai said it was “utter nonsense” that his agency's decisions on media ownership would lead to a company dominating local media markets by buying up newspapers and radio stations.
>“It will open the door to pro-competitive combinations that will strengthen local voices,” he said, and “better serve local communities.”
How?
I'm not quite sure how the combination of a more consolidated industry and the removal of local studios results in stronger local voices.
The use of words and phrases like "utter nonsense", or "absurd", or "it's offensive to even suggest..." is rampant in Trump administration officials' hyper-defensive interactions with the public -- especially if there's even the slightest adversarial questioning of policy elements on merit. It's like some sort of winking signal that rational discourse is no longer to be tolerated. I don't know if this is somehow coordinated, these administrators all have chips on their shoulders, or they're simply following the model.
I think it's an important point, but I think it extends far beyond and predates the Trump administration.
It happens all over the political spectrum to a degree, but the GOP and its supporters have really embraced it and have been using that kind of rhetoric for a long time (and it's worked very well for them in terms of framing and dominating debate): Consider talk radio, such as Limbaugh, which goes back to the 1980s or early 90s; Fox News hosts, such as O'Reilly and Hannity; and the Wall St Journal opinion pages. Look at the rhetoric used by Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Bush administration, or, for a specific example, the GOP congressman who yelled 'you lie' during an Obama State of the Union speech. Over-the-top, hyper-aggressive attacks on the other side is their common rhetorical tactic; they are demonstrations of aggression, for their supporters and for anyone who might disagree. (That's not meant to be partisan; I believe those are the facts and it would be false to say the politically correct thing, 'everyone does it equally':)
It's much broader than politics too. It's in reality TV, but by far the biggest example is Internet discussion boards. It's a continuing problem on HN, though my impression is that it's improved significantly here (thank goodness!). Certainly that predates Trump!
It's an obvious tactic in an argument: Act so aggressively and angrily that the other side is intimidated, and at worst no serious discussion is possible. It ends the discussion.
Consider The Onion's 2013 Point/Counterpoint article on the Iraq War:
* Point: This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism
* Counterpoint: No it won't. It just won't. None of that will happen. You're getting worked up over nothing. Everything is going to be fine. So just relax, okay? You're really overreacting.
I think you just summed up the political plan laid by Newt Gingrich in the 1980's when he brought the religious movements into the GOP and executed his 'Contract with America'. It was a plan of domination by all means necessary.
While I have exactly zero theoretical or empirical foundation for this, I've found that Kubler-Ross' 5 stages of grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) works really well as a conversational compass in adversarial interactions.
Trump handpicked these people to dismantle the Federal government's executive branch, and his base things it's gotten too strong. To them, regulations are overall an example of the problem.
Tax reform - less taxes
EPA - hired a guy who fought the EPA, authorized keystone pipeline immediately.
Betsy Devoss - privatizing stuff and slashing budgets
HUD - Ben Carson, neurosurgeon
Department of Energy - Rick Perry who didn't know what it does and wanted to close it, who isn't a scientist
And of course Ajit Pai, probably the best example of rollback of progress.
Jeff Sessions disappointed Trump when he recused himself.
You gotta understand... Trump's a fiscal conservative's dream. Short of Ron Paul no conservative would have the guts to sabotage the executive branch with crazy directors as much as Trump.
A fiscal conservative’s worst nightmare you mean - slashing programs to fund bigger military, rich people initiatives and boondoggles. none of the policies enacted r dudes the size or spend of government, it just redirects it to benefit the elite ruling class.
While true, this is not the full story. As I'm sure you know, the FCC is split between Republican and Democratic nominations by design, and Pai was nominated as the Republican option. It was Trump who appointed him as Chair, thus giving him the authority to carry out his (de)regulatory agenda.
Right, but Obama still picked him out of the universe of republicans. It’s not like the RNC told Obama who to nominate. Lumping him together with Betsy DeVoss is a misleading attempt to paint him as outside the mainstream. Yes, he’s pro-deregulation, but hardly to an unusual degree. The whole developed world is in a two-decade trend of liberalizing their telecom markets. The EU, for example, doesn’t have any media ownership rules similar to the FCC’s, not do member countries like Sweden. Many countries have nothing like our ponderous (about $8 billion per year) universal service fund. To pick random examples: Sweden got rid of its universal service fund in the 2000s, Germany in theory has one but it’s never been invoked, and Denmark never extended it to broadband (like Obama did here).
It isn't of course. And one only has go back and read the history of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC)[1] where it was sued by other voices trying to break into a market dominated by a single media company.
Oddly enough it is exactly like Google in a way, the ability to sustain a network depends on the ability to sell advertising which depends on viewership for pricing. And being unable to get viewership denies an ability to exist through advertising. So having a monopoly on advertising makes you the defacto monopoly on the viewership because it denies capital to a competitor to develop additional viewership.
Is "pro competitive combination" the new nonsense phrase everyone is going to start repeating? The people who come up with these things sure do have a sense of humor.
It won't; this move was done to benefit a media company known as Sinclair. This company has a decidedly pro-Trump stance, and they require the local stations they control to air pro-Trump commentary.
Make no mistake this is a political move, and one that is right out of a fascist/authoritarian playbook.
Seattle's KOMO news crams all of these ridiculous political segments (including Clinton smear-pieces and other alt-right recruitment videos) into their 2-4am slots just to keep too many viewers from seeing them.
I often wonder why they don't air these videos at peak hour, prefixed with a "you're about to see some bullshit - call your representatives" warning. It's better to fight this kind of public enemy on an open field.
I guess it's nice to think about, but that would be insubordinate to their management/ownership. Individuals who execute plans like that lose out big time and get quickly replaced.
The Sinclair move to dominate airwaves and include media-agenda-framed-as-individual-opinion-pieces on TV news is very concerning to me. It's disappointing that this rule change will only help them continue their domination.
But I wonder if this might incidentally happen to be the right move for the government to make? The flow of information and news is very different today from the landscape that existed in the 1970s. Maybe letting investment flow into some of these businesses makes sense.
We've already asked you to stop using HN primarily for political and ideological purposes, so we've banned this account. If you'd like the account to be unbanned you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com and commit to following the guidelines in the future.
That's the same kind of thing companies will say when they remove a bunch of features and drop a product: it is to better serve you, the customer. Never mind that it is complete nonsense.
"The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can."
Quote from EA when asked why heroes took ridiculous playtime to unlock, skippable with microtransactions, for a $60 game.
It seems like one of the provisions was blocking local stations from jointly negotiating on advertising. I don't know if makes sense to limit broadcast media this way. Google is allowed to buy properties in different markets (search/youtube/mobile/news) to consolidate their position. I suppose now the non-internet media can compete with Google on advertising by consolidating.
Anyway, this is just my take after a cursory glance. Happy to listen to other viewpoints.
Note the new rules only permit one entity to own two of the top four stations in a market, addressing the only real consolidation concern (that the natural scarcity of radio channels would allow natural radio monopolies to form).
But as far as I can tell, there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly. Why should anyone regulate combinations in that area?
>But as far as I can tell, there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly. Why should anyone regulate combinations in that area?
Very, very few regulations are designed with the sole purpose of dealing with natural monopoly. Most are there to prevent some monstrous or dystopian consequence of unfettered capitalism that we as a society have decided is undesirable.
Having a tiny group of wealthy oligarchs own all media, press, acceptable thought in an area is one of those horrifying dystopian consequences that we apply these regulations to prevent.
Be careful any time you see an analysis of media consolidation that ignores the reality on the ground -- the media's unique ability to define and shape public opinion. Such an analysis is either so purely academic as to be not relevant to any actual political or social discussion, hopelessly naive or, worse, willfully ignorant in service of a particular ideology.
> Most are there to prevent some monstrous or dystopian consequence of unfettered capitalism that we as a society have decided is undesirable.
When regulations aren’t designed to address identifiable market failure modes, like for example a natural monopoly or negative externality, they’re usually driven by vague public interest handwaving. Economic theory is hardly infallible, but it’s a lot better of a basis for law than that.
The public interest is not handwaving, it is the entire purpose of govermnent. Under your definition laws banning slavery for example are "public interest handwaving".
> there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly
While I can't provide theory, in practice they certainly are. Every city has one or two papers of any significance; it's hard to name a new major newspaper that started in the last 50 years. In many places, the leading papers have combined for economic survival, but kept their editorial pages separate, for diversity of voices.
Maybe it's due to high barriers to entry? You need a printing press, distribution, and a reputation for reliability - the last probably being a newspaper's most valuable, irreplaceable asset.
The Internet provides more competition and lower barriers to entry, but I'll bet the leading Internet news source almost every town is the local newspaper(s).
Economy of scale (or rather, too small a scale to be economical) is almost certainly the problem.
Producing a newspaper of a certain number of pages of a certain quality requires the same amount of work, regardless of whether it is read by 10 people or 10 million, but your revenue will be proportional to readership; you have a small per-reader additional cost, to print or provide bandwidth, but it's largely a fixed cost, to research and write the articles.
I'm not sure how the internet helps or hurts. It will help in that you can start smaller on the internet, with a one or two person operation publishing infrequently, but when you try to scale up you'll run headlong into the "people don't pay for news online" problem.
In any case, if you want to run a "real" newspaper, you need a certain minimum number of subscribers to be viable, to hire enough people to research enough articles to provide enough information each day to really be considered a "newspaper". This, in turn, is where you could imagine unfair competition from monopolies. First, your larger newspapers will be able to undercut you, producing better news articles at lower cost per reader, if they have more readers. Second, a large enough conglomerate of regional newspapers can afford to run some at a loss. There are only so many available subscribers, and if you can deny your competitors enough to be viable, they'll also be running at a loss, and your deeper pockets will let you wait them out.
>But as far as I can tell, there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly. Why should anyone regulate combinations in that area?
Not yet, but as local newspapers continue to lose readership to the internet, the will start consolidating and/or failing. After say 20 years of this, there will be only the big online national papers, NYT, WaPo and some others that serve a large niche. There will always be room for the smaller niche papers though.
The other two can be owned by the Educational Media Foundation, and all the programming can be sent in by satellite now that broadcasters no longer have to have a local presence.
Turns out that’s surprisingly complex. I was just going to clarify that iHeartMedia is the real answer, but: Clear Channel Communications as we know it became iHeartCommunications, wholly held by iHeartMedia, Inc., which is apparently distinct from the iHeartMedia division of iHeartMedia, Inc. That division operates iHeartRadio as a brand, I’m pretty sure, and inherited the Clear Channel IP and production-side stuff. I think a lot of the actual transmitter assets and licenses were held by CCC (or maybe CCB?), but the buyout that took them private meant they lost their FCC special treatment and had to park a bunch of stations on entities like Aloha until someone bought them. Which is about as slow a market as you’d expect a decade later:
I’ve read the Wikipedia page a couple times now and still haven’t reverse engineered that labyrinth. Don’t read about mass media ownership in large doses; you’re likely to stroke out.
Given the Bain buyout and associated debt has spun iHeartMedia firmly around the drain for years, it’s a bit amusing to see Pai soften up the very regulations that made it a complicated deal in the first place. Sinclair 1, Clear Channel 0.
Traditional local media (broadcast radio, newspaper, broadcast TV) are oversupplied and under severe economic/competitive pressure; there needs to be less of them which means consolidation and winding down marginal operations.
It's kind of unreasonable for regulators to be too harsh on consolidation in a shrinking market, what else are they going to do to survive?
Remember that you can pretty much bank on:
. When a politician accuses someone else of something, they're doing it themselves.
. When a politician makes a claim on controversial legislation, the opposite of that claim is the truth.
This rule was repealed for one and one purpose only. Allow Sinclair Media, a pro-Trump media organization, to buy up local TV stations and blast propaganda news during your 9'o'clock news hour. Here's a great article covering the motivations of Sinclair. It is time to fight back and get rid of Ajit Pai
If a media outlet wants to buy stations and supply more conservative friendly news, how is that any different from Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and supplying liberal friendly news?
For those who would want to counter that buying many local stations outweighs buying a single outlet in the Washington Post, I would bet WaPo reaches as many or more people as all local stations put together in the US through their massive social media and generally online presence. Not only that, while local stations only air news at a set time each day, WaPo articles are persistent and ubiquitous.
The scale of outreach and influence for a site like WaPo is really tremendous when you think about it.
One: you have a long row to hoe before asserting that the Washington Post supplies "liberal-friendly news." They may (I would say do) have a moderately liberal-friendly editorial board. Much as the WSJ may (and again, I would say does) have an extremely conservative-friendly editorial board. To conflate the editorial board and reporting is, frankly, either disingenuous or bordering on it.
Two: you have an even longer row to hoe to tie together buying one paper and buying as many TV stations as one can to blanket an area. We all know about what Sinclair's up to--given the levels of handwringing put out by the folks on Pai's side of the aisle about the (non-existent, but whatever) suppression of right-wing speech, maybe the notion of choking off differing voices under the Sinclair umbrella rings just a little bit hollow?
When you dismiss suppression of conservative positions, I say that I would be shocked if I ever saw a liberal outlet advocate or even try to reason about the case against Sanctuary Cities.
It's an example of suppression because if I even tried to bring up the debate I would be ridiculed and accused of being a racist. We can't debate the issue, and so anyone who would want to advocate for such a position is suppressed.
Because it's not "Conservative" in any way, shape or meaning. It's not holding back to an older time. It's not being fiscally responsible. It's selling out monopoly status to the lowest bidder. And look, we have a corporate pro-Trump mouthpiece that was waiting for this law change.
If we're talking "Conservative" back to the good old days, I believe Adam Smith has some choice things to talk about appropriate regulation and prevention of monopolies. But that just gets inconvenient.
And as for your jab at sanctuary cities; do you know WHY they were made? Because immigrants were easy pickings. An "illegal" or someone who isn't sure is ripe pickings for all sorts of bad stuff. The conservative answer here is pretty simple: let them get hurt or assaulted or murdered - they shouldn't have been here!
But to funding, if the Federal govt wants to shove a thumb up their collective butts to decide again and again to not touch immigration, well, they can enforce it as well. The states certainly aren't funded for that sort of work. The feds are asking for free enforcement of their jobs.
I'd imagine that I understand conservative theory better, having been one a long ago, and worked for a local state congressman. And a lot of it is wrong, being predicated that you're some embarrassed millionaire. They've fooled enough people that way. Got'em riled up, angry. It always easy to go after "Other"... Like those Mexicans. Or right now, North Koreans.
There’s a balance between state and local rights and laws and federal law. My city has an obligation to enforce local law and isn’t responsible for the shitshow of Federal immigration policy.
By meddling in federal matters, local police poison their relationship with the populace and become less effective.
The conservative position on this topic is strange, as they generally resist federal meddling.
The difference is that broadcast spectrum is limited in a geographic area and licensed for the benefit of the local community, not as a propaganda mouthpiece of a single politically-motivated organization who doesn’t even have a presence in that community.
Weird that you would focus on Bezos and not Rupert Murdoch, who is already what you fear Jeff Bezos could become. In fact, it'd take decades for Bezos to acquire the amount of media influence Rupert Murdoch has on several continents.
A major beneficiary of the deregulatory moves, analysts say, is Sinclair, a conservative broadcasting company that is seeking to buy up Tribune Media for $3.9 billion.
The conclusion of this paper from 2001 supports revoking the rules, or at least that the rules aren’t necessary for their stated goal of providing diverse opinions:
"A Tale of Three Cities: “Diverse and Antagonistic” Information in Situations of Local Newspaper/ Broadcast Cross-Ownership"
This Article examined whether three existing newspaper/broadcast combinations in major markets provided information about the 2000 presidential campaign from "diverse and antagonistic sources." The results show clearly that they did provide a wide range of diverse information. In other words, the Commission's historical assumption that media ownership inevitably shapes the news to suit its own interests may no longer be true (if it ever was).
The September 2001 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking demonstrated the Commission's interest in solid empirical evidence about newspaper/broadcast combinations. The evidence of the study reported in this Article suggests that the prohibition on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership has outlived its usefulness.
> The conclusion of this paper from 2001 supports revoking the rules, or at least that the rules aren’t necessary for their stated goal of providing diverse opinions
Hmm... From reading your quote, it sounds to me like it's saying that the rules are working properly. What these changes are going to allow is a single company with a known one-sided agenda to buy up all media in several markets. How will that work out?
The study looked at three cities where the newspaper and radio station were owned by the same company (“cross-ownership”), due to having been grandfathered in when the FCC rule was created in 1975.
The FCC revoked multiple rules, but one of those prevented cross-ownership. The stated goal of all of the rules was to encourage a diversity of views. At least with respect to the cross-ownership rule, this study found it wasn’t necessary for a diversity of views to exist.
> One long-standing rule repealed Thursday prevented one company in a given media market from owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station
> Another rule blocked TV stations in the same market from merging with each other if the combination would leave fewer than eight independently owned stations
> The agency also took aim at rules restricting the number of TV and radio stations that any media company could simultaneously own in a single market.
Now, let me first say that Trump and Ajit Pal have been, are and will be a disaster for media and broadband regulation. That out of the way, let me say this:
These rules were crafted in an era when we had:
- Local newspapers
- A limited number of more broadly distributed papers (state, national)
- 3 Broadcast TV networks (4 including PBS) where local stations were affiliates.
- The importance of radio for entertainment and news
- Limited market penetration of cable TV and far less channels and content choice than we have today
So compare that to today:
- We can have a virtually unlimited number of TV channels through cable and the Internet
- Radio has a vastly greater array of options through satellite radio (eg Sirius) and the Internet (eg podcasts)
- Newspapers are a dying breed, replaced with online news distribution.
- The barrier to entry to creating, promoting and getting an audience for, say, a local issue blog is comparatively cheap now. Previously it either wasn't possible or was orders of magnitude more difficult.
So it would be foolish to say the the media landscape hasn't changed drastically in 40 years.
Now the devil is in the details here. So if there can be less than 8 independent stations in a market, how many can there be? 6? 4? 3? 2? Because there's a difference.
Honestly there's far more scandalous and outright dangerous things to get outraged about with this administration.
Just because the landscape has changed does not mean that the rule is irrelevant today. This change is politically motivated, not one of "this rule is outdated".
There's a very low barrier to entry for new tech companies these days, but they all get bought out by Facebook, Google, Amazon. The end result, despite this low barrier to entry, is a conglomeration of power. If a single company buys up many small media companies and forces content, there is incredible power in that and frankly one of the most dangerous things that this administration has actually accomplished. Sinclair is just one example.
> Radio has a vastly greater array of options through satellite radio (eg Sirius)
Satellite radio is one provider since the XM/Sirius merger. Broadcast radio is vastly more consolidated in ownership and in operation within each of the small number of ownership groups.
Radio may provide a greater illusion of choice with more stations in the dial, but there is less actual diversity in control.
The rationale that seems to be put forth now is that there's so much competition between mediums that it's ok to allow monopolies of each one of them.
I think this is absurd of course, but that's the argument that's always made implicitly or explicitly.
It's also scary as hell because ISPs have disproportionate control.
And once they're granted all sorts of freedoms to screw over consumers, it's going to be a lot more difficult to take it away from them.
All Pai has to do is set the ball rolling and it won't stop.
I don't really see a political landscape in the near future where you have anti-monopoly laws being enforced. All the current corporate monopoly whores will have to die of old age first.
If all of your alternative media sources are available via the Internet, there is one decent internet service provider in your area, and network neutrality rules are suspended, then we're back to just a couple companies (or one) that control what media is available in an area.
Barrier for entry is lower, but it's also harder to get paid for local news. Local coverage of political activities pretty much sucks except in major cities.
Someone needs to go wake up Teddy Roosevelt. As rude as it would be to wake him up, we need someone to recognise that the amount of consolidation the country is reaching is incredibly dangerous. This teetering near Deus Ex level amounts of consolidation. Yes, the current aims at Google and Facebook are nice to see. But, the deregulation of media companies is allowing anti-consumer practices. Even the video game industry is starting to receive backlash for its "non-gambling" practices and the lootbox.
Pardon for the rant, that kind of seems everywhere. But, allowing something like this to form is dangerous, especially with how strong lobbying is now. With facebook actively suppressing certain ideologies, the soon to be larger media companies will now have no issue writing off conflicting ideas as well.
It's wild how we can look back in history, identify a time just like this with all the same problems, and pick out the very man perfect for these circumstances. Hell, at this point we just need to locate his spiritual reincarnation and turn him or her loose, knowing they are perfect for the job.
They said history is a circle, but this is just so blatant.
It's even more concerning now, considering how much control and visibility into our lives companies have, thanks to mobile phones and digital tracking.
> But, the deregulation of media companies is allowing anti-consumer practices.
> Even the video game industry is starting to receive backlash for its "non-gambling" practices and the lootbox.
The implication is that it's standard to implement anti-consumer practices like gambling (not called gambling) into consumer products (games). The VAST majority of games now, in a trend starting since circa 2005, has been to milk the customer via chance-based microtransactions, aka the "freemium" model. Games that do not use this, are heavily criticized by industry and critics as oversights or even unfair. i.e. You mean I might pay $X for a game and what if I don't like it? Now I'm out all $X!
The current aim at Facebook book is to harvest as much of the world's attention as possible to resell to advertisers. Users are not it's customers, the businesses that pay it to advertise are. It's primary goal is to suck you in and keep you using it by any means necessary, ethics be damned
EA recently released a statement that their "Loot Box" mechanic, a system by which players can only purchase items by buying them in a randomly-generated bundle, does not constitute gambling. If you were looking for a specific item, you may have to purchase hundreds of these boxes. EA argues that since the box you purchase is guaranteed to have some kind of item, the rules and regulations that apply to gambling with legal tender do not apply.
So if a slot machine was guaranteed to return at least 1 cent (which they're pretty close to doing anyway) then they would be exempt from gambling regulations?
Oh wow, that sounds terrible. When I was in the military I remember a base bowling alley having some fake slots machines. You paid for credits and played for points. People really got addicted to it because it displayed the highest scores. I assume if these loot boxes are tied to a multiplayer game with social interaction it would have the same result. Some will always want to impress the rest with their ‘fake’ points/items.
Physical grab bag sales are not new (in gaming, they basically define the CCG segment, sports trading cards used the same model and inspired CCGs; if anything, those physical precedents—where the items can be individually resold—are more like gambling than computer game lootboxes.)
To be honest, I don't think those are any better just because they've existing for a while. MTG is notorious for sucking in people to buy more and more game packs.
And they're not as comparable since game progression isn't "sped up" by putting money into the machine.
Actually, “game progression” (that is, what in-game things you have, what your status is in organized play groups outside of specialized, sealed-box tournaments, etc.) in collectible card (or miniature, etc.) games absolutely is sped up by pouring more money into the randomized sets that are sold.
Also, with those, your paying for a random chance of more valuable products that, in addition to using in play, you can resell for cash. It's quite a bit more like gambling with and for money than lootboxes are.
Just look up the EA Star Wars Battlefront 2 stuff. It's a big old mess. You pay money for crates which randomly drop items that improve the game experience.
Some people consider it gambling because you are preying on the same tendencies in people for your own gain. People also don't get any real value for their "gambling". Other people say this makes it not gambling, etc. That's a very simple oversimplification of the subject - there's a lot of articles out there about it right now.
It's turning a game into a skinner box designed to extract as much money as possible from those who buy the game. It operates on the same basic principles as slot machines.
The counter-argument goes that people "should know" and be responsible with their money, but I'm not a fan of that argument. It relies on people being perfectly rational actors that they just aren't.
I'm personally in favor of instituting regulation for these things. Even if it is just purely from the "we have to protect the children" angle - children are arguably the main market for these strategies after all.
I completely agree with you, however I find this bit a little mysterious:
> With facebook actively suppressing certain ideologies
The only ideologies I've heard of Facebook suppressing lately are Neo-Nazi and alt-right groups following the Charlottesville stuff. I don't take issue with these ideologies being suppressed.
Am I missing something?
EDIT: Apparently so because someone just went through my history and down-voted all my comments...
Yep, both Facebook and Twitter regularly plop up on media for shutting down or suspending left-wing sites. For example, "Kein Mensch ist illegal" was even awarded a prize by FB (2014) and in 2016 their admin got suspended (https://www.mimikama.at/allgemein/facebook-sperrt-admin-von-...). Problem here is that the alt-right (ab)uses the reporting features combined with sensitive anti-spam measures at the providers. Given enough reporting Nazis, even the biggest accounts are easy targets. That the Big 3 (FB, Twitter, Youtube) don't have a way to reach a human or file an appeal at a court of law (which I can do, for example, if my telco provider shuts down my internet access and with it my email account) doesn't exactly help either. Big-ish accounts with media influence or people with connections to employees of the companies may help, but this is a luxury only a few people have.
> EDIT: Apparently so because someone just went through my history and down-voted all my comments...
Don't worry - had the same thing happen to me recently, I believe after the Charlottesville murder.
> The only ideologies I've heard of Facebook suppressing lately
Conservatives put up a fit when they accused Facebook employees of censoring or otherwise biasing the "Trending Topics" feature to prevent conservative stories from appearing there.
Last I heard, about 2 FB employees were suspended or fired over the story, but that's just from memory so I could be completely wrong. As a result of the accusations, FB reportedly converted Trending Topics to be completely automated. It was probably easier to abuse for coordinated troll armies once it was automated.
> Suppression of opinion implicitly violates the Bill of Rights
NO.
The Bill of Rights are enumerated protections FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
The concept of "Freedom of Speech" is different and more broad than the First Amendment to the US Constitution, but a private entity not protecting it is not a violation of the First Amendment or any other 9. Yes, the double-negative is important.
The Constitution remains amendable. We hear arguments frequently that the Second fails to sufficiently account for modernity. Perhaps the First does, too.
I do not consider Nazi ideology an opinion. Their ideas are purely based on maintaining a power dynamic. There's no logic or legitimacy to their ideas, and thus they are not opinions. They change the ideology as needed to maintain power and promote their own strength.
For a historical viewpoint, simply look at how often the German Nazi party would change what classifies as being a Jew or "undesirable". It was only ever about putting fear into people and maintaining control. They had no real opinions on why these people were undesirable - those could be made up after the fact.
If Nazism was an opinion, I would be willing to defend it. But it's not, and it thrives when it's given the legitimacy as such.
EDIT: To try and tie this back to the topic at hand, are blatant lies still "opinions"? What about death threats and hate speech? My point is simply that we already make distinctions about what kind of speech is free, so I feel that Facebook instituting policies that align with these existing rules makes sense - even though I feel that they are becoming too large to be the de-facto source for information on the Internet.
Even if I use a million sock-puppets to amplify my voice? I generally agree with the idea that one (physical) person's stated opinion shouldn't be squashed, but we are dealing with scale here.
Hmm. I wouldn't say Nazi sympathisers... I'd rather say extreme libertarians. They see every kind of speech as acceptable, no matter how hard history has proven this kind of speech to lead to ultimate desaster and suffering.
Anyway, HN has always tended to the libertarian side of things, doesn't surprise me that there is also quite a bunch of radical libertarians. Thankfully, there also seem to be some Antifas in here, if only to provide some counterweight...
No, far from it. I did not equate them (and I never would), but there are a number of libertarians who believe that fascism is a valid part of the political spectrum and covered by free speech.
That does not neccessarily mean that they support fascism itself - in fact, I have yet to see a libertarian who does not say that he/she despises fascism.
There's a political party that has stated opposition to this kind for consolidation and resisted industry pressure to remove this regulation, and one which has stated it's support for this kind of deregulation and actively pursued it.
There's times when the relationship between public posturing, voting, and policy results in murky and opaque, but this isn't one of them.
this is in line with the current republican structure. they want to dismantle any regulations, minimize government and let the pieces fall where they may.
Don't you think it's about time we removed all the unnessecary independent voices from media so we can stop confusing people? The Russians and Chinese are doing it; we need to catch up - we've got to have unity in our messages. /Sarcasm
It’s a perfect storm. Kill net neutrality and then restrictions preventing local media monopolies.
People have been manipulated by their chosen media like no other time in history, and I can’t see where we go from here.
Enterprises will have the singular ability to control what vast swaths of the populace hears and believes. At best it’s a continuance of recent trends, and at worst the failure of the republic.
In my view, the media ownership rules were indefensible. First, they were not driven by the sort of legitimate economic concerns that usually drive anti-consolidation efforts. They were not (at least, not primarily) justified, for example, on the basis of media companies being able to exercise market power to charge too much for advertising. Instead, they were justified by the government's desire to influence the content of media. A well meaning desire, perhaps, but still a fundamentally illegitimate exercise of government power.
Second, the broadcasting-license tail was wagging the merger dog. The FCC's purpose is to address the "tragedy of the commons" that might result if people could use public broadcast frequencies freely without concern for others. It's not an antitrust agency, and has no expertise in that area. It has overextended its authority over broadcasting licenses to exercise control over mergers in industries it has no jurisdiction over (in this case, newspapers).
The second point, that the FCC is not the correct body, was something I had never thought of before. Why is the FCC trying to make anti-trust rules? The FDA doesn't make anti-trust rules for companies it oversees.
Curiously enough, one of the other controversies in the news right now is the DOJ - which normally enforces anti-trust rules - supposedly telling AOL that they'd have to sell off either Turner Broadcasting or DirecTV if they wanted to merge with Time Warner due to competition concerns. Apparently this was an evil attack by Trump on the media, nothing whatsoever to do with the issues caused by one company owning both a major pay TV provider and a major provider of content.
Pai should be in jail. This is absurd. The guy is lying to everyone's face from a government function. When has ever a consolidation not lead to a monopoly and when has a monopoly not been abused?
I hate mergers and think they’re dumb, but maybe this is for the best. Isn’t the problem with internet news is that it comes from everywhere, enforcing a kind of chaos of truth and a race to the bottom? Maybe we should have near monopolies in media, so that a certain laziness pervades and people don’t care about ratings?
> Isn’t the problem with internet news is that it comes from everywhere, enforcing a kind of chaos of truth and a race to the bottom?
No, the problem with internet news is that it's getting easier and easier to promote a lie as truth. With a monopoly in media, promoting lies will become even easier (for that monopoly).
I upvoted you not because I agree (or disagree) with you, but because I think you politely presented a well-reasoned opinion and shouldn't be in the grey.
I didn't downvote, but I don't see it as well reasoned. It's essentially the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy[1]. In this case, increased media consolidation has nothing to with how fake internet news is.
In fact, I'm of the opinion that further media consolidation will move us further from low-bias information sources and towards more MSNBC / FoxNews extreme partisan news sources. It will likely continue the convergence of entertainment and journalism which only serves to dilute the little media literacy that we still have in the USA.
This worked, once upon a time, when the major media outfits were close to the center, and cared about doing their jobs of reporting rather than trying to push a viewpoint. If we got those conditions again, sure, this could work.
That only existed for television news and only because the FCC required television stations to air after-work news without commercials (making it a cost center) as a condition of their FCC airwaves licenses. Reagan's administration dropped that rule, deregulating television stations, turning news departments in to potential profit centers, and further merging entertainment and journalism.
As far as I can tell, the current administration and Congress are more interested in moving further away from regulations than closer to the pre-Reagan regulation regime.
To be fair, I don't think it will work today even if that regulatory rule was re-implemented. At the time, the vast majority of the US only had a choice of 3 major television networks, which were more or less equally non-partisan. Currently, there are too many channels and people that tune into certain channels do so to avoid being challenged by ideas they don't already believe.
The political mood on media regulation has shifted, at least from where I sit, in the the past weeks. Twitter blew its hearing. Facebook and Google failed to salve the wound by sending deputies.
The belief I'm sensing is that the only way to check these companies is through competition from traditional media, including ISPs. If Google and Facebook and Twitter are running roughshod with our data, this thinking goes, maybe the solution is letting others challenge their data monopoly.
You and I see the problem with this. It's harder to evade Comcast than Google or Facebook. But every day, that becomes less true. In any case, this is the first step in Silicon Valley's price for what is broadly seen as its arrogance.
> I don't see what Twitter/FB/Google have to do with this
Why are "religious rights" and low taxes in the same envelope? Because they're the same constituency. There is no underlying sense to it other than political sense.
Media mergers of the kind Sinclair or TWC have pursued, or are pursuing, have traditionally been argued against by Google et al's lobbyists. There just isn't another organized constituency who cares about local radio. But the precedents from local radio spilling into ISPs? Now there's a worry.
Those same lobbyists now represent politically wounded clients. When the cats are away, the mice come out to play.
You mean Google, a company that was founded in the late 90s, is responsible for an FTC rule originating 42 years ago?
Your entire premise is incredibly flawed; religious rights and low taxes may be part of the same constituency, but opposition to media mergers is not a strict left or right issue.
> You mean Google, a company that was founded in the late 90s, is responsible for an FTC rule originating 42 years ago?
So nobody who wasn't around when the Constitution was written can be instrumental in defending it today?
> opposition to media mergers is not a strict left or right issue
Pardon me, I did not intend to imply it is. My point was in coalitions not always have logical sets of views.
There is no organized coalition against local radio consolidation. For a while, nobody bothered defeating it. Now Sinclair has. Opposition is needed. Unfortunately, nobody cares about local radio. At least not enough to organize.
The only ones defending the old rule--at least when it's come up in New York, California or Arizona, or the limited D.C. circles I'm privy to--are companies fearing its creep. The dominant constituency amongst those companies are the tech majors.
It seems like you're saying they're removing merger barriers so TV stations can compete more effectively against internet companies by becoming larger traffickers of information? And that Google or similar lobbying interests have been trying to keep local broadcasting fragmented?
Your premises seem weirdly flawed. Maybe I've misinterpreted you or overlooked some trend but I think you need to establish your underlying claims a lot better before drawing such a conclusion.
It was pretty staggering to see AT&T basically threaten the White House over the DOJ's attempts to stop their Time Warner merger (threatening to investigate whether Trump had any influence on the DOJ's attempt to stop it).
It might be unprecedented for the White House to publicly discuss preferred merger conditions, but the agencies involved report to the president so its probably naive to think that kind of politics has not always been involved.
This is a combination of a powerful company who thinks this is their moment with a lax regulatory regime and they have to take it no matter what, and also we have a president now who doesn't care about keeping up appearances or abiding precedent, so all the gross behind the scenes stuff is getting vomited up into public discourse because neither one of them care about hiding it.
Like I said, I think that's more an artifact of how easily stuff spills into public discourse with this administration than any indication that it never happened before.
In many places of the USA there is only a single ISP to choose from. Where as there are many search engines and many social networks available to choose from. No one has ever forced you to use Google or Facebook but for many people they are forced to use a particular ISP.
And no one has ever forced you to watch a particular TV station or read a particular news paper. By this reasoning nobody has ever forced you to use the internet either.
If the internet has a strong enough network effect to make its use basically mandatory then so does Facebook.
>“It will open the door to pro-competitive combinations that will strengthen local voices,” he said, and “better serve local communities.”
How?
I'm not quite sure how the combination of a more consolidated industry and the removal of local studios results in stronger local voices.