What happens when media get too big for their britches?

WASHINGTON, (CNS) - Who ever knew there could be so much tension in relaxation?

Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin has unveiled his intent to relax media ownership rules -- possibly by December if he gets his way -- as long as he can get two more votes on the five-member FCC.

Perhaps Martin forgot that ownership rules were relaxed, not strengthened, in 1996. Those rules increased the number of radio stations one company could own in one market to eight, gave greater leeway to companies owning two TV stations in the same market, increased the percentage of Americans one company could reach with the TV stations it owns.

Martin hasn't released his plan, even though he wants a vote on it by the end of the year. In some places, people would call that buying a pig in a poke.

How big is too big? Things were already plenty big by the time Ben H. Bagdikian wrote his first edition of "The Media Monopoly" back in the 1980s. His seventh edition was published in 2004. Since he started, the different kinds of communications media have increased, but the market share of the prime players in each medium also has increased. And companies look to stretch their tentacles wherever they think they can finally get hold of some long-elusive "synergy" that makes the inflated purchase prices worth it.

The biggest problem is that the synergies aren't that easy to find. To pay for the acquisition, the buyer inevitably makes cuts in staffing, leaving the local community in a boat without a paddle while programming decisions are made at some far-away corporate headquarters.

Clear Channel, already the largest owner of radio stations in the United States, has expressed its hopes that the FCC will increase the ownership caps in a market from eight stations to 10. What purpose will that serve? Who would benefit -- besides Clear Channel?

"The airwaves do not belong to corporations, entities that hold licenses allowing them to utilize the resource. The airwaves are owned by all of us," said an Oct. 25 statement by the Prometheus Radio Project, which advocates the establishment of low-power radio stations to serve big-city neighborhoods and small towns across the United States.

"Setting a reasonable set of limitations on ownership is not a burden to those who have the privilege of operating broadcast signals for the public benefit. The only people that support elimination of these rules are those who stand to gain financially," it added.

Ownership is often followed by a sense of entitlement. Comcast, which routes more cable TV into homes than any other U.S. operator, is also one of the biggest names in the Internet service field.

In October, The Associated Press ran a series of tests to try and swap files online using some of the more popular file-sharing services. These services have been fingered as the ones most commonly used to illegally download copyrighted music, movies and other media.

But AP didn't use a song or a film to swap. It used the King James Bible. Why? Because it was a big file -- a critical element to the test -- and because it is in the public domain.

Comcast, for all its perceived omniscience, cannot tell what content is being swapped. Still, it sent fake messages to the senders telling them the file transfer had been stopped and to try again later.

"Under a net neutrality law, those kind of practices would be illegal," said Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Oct. 27.

A net neutrality law -- short for network neutrality -- would guarantee equal access to all parts of the Web.

"Others would like to go further and make the Internet a utility under government supervision," Eckersley added. "But however it comes out, we need an Internet in which all users paying the same price get equal service."

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Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops