Cable Access - cable TV regulation

Reason, July, 2000 by Virginia Postrel

Regulation gave us media monopolies. Can consumer power shake them?

Americans hate their cable companies--for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.

So when Time Warner yanked ABC from the homes of more than 3 million subscribers, including a lot of Manhattanite media stars, the cable company was bound to lose the p.r. battle. As Eric Mink of the New York Daily News put it, "On one side, there's Oprah Winfrey, Regis Philbin, Ted Koppel, Dennis Franz, Diane Sawyer, Michael J. Fox, Drew Carey, Jenna Elfman and Peter Jennings. On the other side, there's...the cable company! The technical term for this situation is 'no-brainer.'"

Beyond the Everyman consensus that the cable company is bad, there was the equally common idea of why that's so: because the cable company is big. Time Warner is already a huge jumble of media properties, from DC Comics to CNN, and it's trying to merge with AOL. Over and over again, populist cynics warned that we might as well get used to its viewers-be-damned attitude.

"It's the future," wrote Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Sun-Times. "A future that doesn't have to be, perhaps, but a future toward which we seem inexorably headed. This nasty shoving match between media megapowers...is a warning to everyone about all that's at stake as conglomerates merge and flex their newly fortified muscle."

The ABC affiliate in Philadelphia put out a press release with much the same message. Viewers in West and North Philly, it said, were victims of Time Warner's "illegal and irresponsible midnight ambush of Channel 6 and its viewers." The big, bad conglomerate had bought out minority-owned Wade Communications, which formerly held the monopoly franchise for those areas, and now Time Warner was beating up its customers. "Time Warner's action is a frightening foreshadowing of how it will treat the public after its merger with AOL," said Dave Davis, the station's general manager.

The problem with this diagnosis is that it ignores history. As it happens, I lived in West Philadelphia in the early 1980s, and I could only dream of such problems. In those days, the issue wasn't whether local cable subscribers would do without Ted Koppel for a few nights. It was whether Philadelphians would ever get cable at all. Local and national companies were clamoring to provide service, and we customers wanted to buy it. But the city council wouldn't let anyone into the cable business.

Council members couldn't make up their minds how exactly to divide up the monopoly territories and what to demand in return. How much favor should local companies get? How about minorities? How many channels should be reserved for public access programming or show-casing city council meetings? Every time deal looked close, it fell apart. Philadelphians who wanted cable TV were victims of years upon years of political ambushes--all in the name of the "public interest." The same was true across the country.

Ever wonder why the low channels in Washington, D.C., are full of unwatchable yack shows featuring local eminences you've never heard of? That's the sort of "public service" payoff it took to get the right to give subscribers ESPN, C-SPAN, and A&E. As for the rinky-dink home shopping and religious stations that clog many cable systems, you can blame the federal "must carry" law--a reflection of a long-standing official bias toward "localism." Must-carry forces a cable company to transmit all local broadcast stations that don't demand payment, even if viewers would rather watch something else.

Contrary to critics like Rosenthal, what we saw in the Disney vs. Time Warner fight wasn't the future. It was the past. It was the destructive, anti-consumer legacy of treating telecommunications as too important for market competition.

For 70 years, federal technocrats have imposed rigid categories on telecom--blocking the fluidity that would otherwise match technological creativity and consumer desires. In the 1970s and '80s, the ostensibly disinterested stasis of federal telecom regulations met the crass, interest-group jockeying of local politics. The combination of federal restrictions and municipal favoritism created the nasty cable companies customers loathe today.

Cable companies aren't bad because they're parts of unwieldy media conglomerates. They're bad because they're monopolies (even where they are no longer legally exclusive) and because the government policies that made them monopolies rewarded lobbying over customer service. In the name of the "public interest," cable companies were taught, and in some cases required bylaw, to screw their subscribers. They learned instead to please the powers that doled out their franchises and protected them from competing technologies.

Making customers happy was desirable, of course, but it wasn't a bottom-line priority. Customers had nowhere else to go.