On Monday, the FCC acted as expected and relaxed media ownership rules, allowing, among other things, networks to own broadcast stations which reach up to forty-five percent of a viewing audience (the rule was previously thirty-five percent) as well as easing rules on cross-ownership of television and radio stations along with newspapers. Note that as of press time, the sky has yet to fall.

As the myriad of protests went, supposedly such relatively cosmetic changes to FCC regulatory structure would lead to the eventual consolidation of all media, an end to all diversity of viewpoints and complete homogenization of media content. Critics point to the deregulation of radio ownership rules, which has since allowed Clear Channel Communications (the bane of anti-corporate types) to dominate the radio station market across the country, providing nationalized playlists and content that critics decry as “the death of local radio.”

Overlooked in this calculation,of course, is the argument that Clear Channel’s local stations could not be a success if they failed to appeal to their listeners’ desires — with the proliferation of cheap car CD-players and the advent of the CD-R drive and satellite radio, local radio hardly constitutes a captive audience. Indeed, listeners who prove dissatisfied with the choices in content provided not only have more choices today in the types of music they can select in terms of the number of stations and formats, they also have more alternatives to traditional radio than ever before, rendering the objection to Clear Channel’s chokehold on the market more an objection by music elitists to the plebeian taste of the masses than a salient critique of deregulation. The very fact of Clear Channel’s success is simply a manifestation of regular market forces at work. If the tastes of the listening public are largely undiscriminating, the result will be swill filling the airwaves — deregulation has nothing to do with this.

Likewise, the same can be said for both the expansion of network ownership along with cross-ownership rules. When the rules were originally conceived, not only were there only three major networks (Fox proving to be a very contradiction to the claim that the oligopoly would prevent the emergence of new players), but there was no Internet and satellite television was unheard of. Today’s consumer can not only obtain television and news from around the world (a prime example would be Qatar-based al Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war), but the very elements of information distribution have become less centralized, not more so. No one news corporation can put a bottleneck on the flow of information by both independent journalists and competing foreign media over the Internet, nor can they stop individuals from seeking out these alternate avenues for news and information.

All of this leads up the very authority these regulations are put forth upon to begin with — by its Congressional authorization, the FCC must put forth rules that explicitly demonstrate their own necessity for preserving and enhancing competition. Indeed, the Supreme Court has also upheld this standard, striking down previous regulations in Fox v. FCC on the grounds that they did not justify why such rules were necessary to safeguard or enhance competition. Ultimately, the onus is on regulators to demonstrate why regulations must be kept in order to safeguard competition — not the other way around.

Yet if anti-corporates are truly concerned, their focus should be less on arbitrary ownership rules but rather on the more fundamental issue of how bandwidth is allocated. Our current system of spectra allocation is both antiquated with regards to current bandwidth-sharing technology and laden with over-padding in the margins between broadcast frequencies, artificially creating a scarcity in bandwidth, inflating the prices broadcasters must pay for new broadcast frequencies and keeping new players from entering the market. If their fears of the erosion of independent voices are genuine, the solution then lies in allowing more players into the market by lowering barriers to entry, not manipulating the market in favor of “viewpoint diversity” which in no way inherently comes from diverse ownership.

However, the ultimate mistake that proponents of tight regulation make is in assuming media consumers are a captive audience, which as the explosion of non-traditional media shows, they are clearly not. Indeed, market forces prove far more adaptive to consumer demand than any regulator can.