Intellectual Property Law

Top Economist's View on Push for Cable A La Carte

By Cynthia Brumfield

The great media economist Bruce Owen, who is now at Stanford (and with whom I worked for many years when he was a full-time consultant) has this great piece in Cato's Regulation magazine entitled "The Temptation of Media Regulation." While I don't share the libertarian philosophy of either the Cato Institute or most ardent free market economists, I tend to share both camps' general disdain for laws and regulations that impinge on free speech.

And as Bruce underscores in his excellent analysis of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's push for cable a la carte regulations, the motivation behind forcing cable companies to unbundle tiers of channels flows primarily not from consumer advocates seeking to lower cable rates but rather from conservative "family values" proponents who want to clamp down on content they deem anti-Christian or indecent or otherwise unacceptable.

An end to bundled programming on what the FCC calls "multichannel video program distributors" (MVPDs) is important to a conservative constituency, which includes many who condemn what they see as immoral and antisocial content on television. Such groups want households to be able to block specific unwanted cable networks from their TV sets, or their communities, lest children or others inadvertently view them.

He goes on to make the case that bundling is an innocuous, usually financially beneficial, practice throughout the media world (imagine newspapers being forced to sell sections of each day's issue separately). He also argues that it's almost impossible to weed out objectionable programming by forcing the sale of individual channels given that such content can appear on any program on even the tamest channels (think Janet Jackson at the SuperBowl.)

Finally, he makes a strong rational case for why cable channel unbundling is hard to justify on an economic, rather than content, basis. But the most important point he makes is that unbundling is rooted in a moral campaign to control content on the TV, something that is almost always obscured in press coverage.

As Adam Thierer points out, Bruce begins his article by noting that when it comes to content, both extremes of the political spectrum often demand the government to intervene and come up with regulations that limit speech. In the case of a la carte regulations, the government seems all too willing to accomodate the demand.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on April 29, 2008 (boomark / email).