Abstract
I. Introduction Today's media marketplace showcases the rapid development of the new medium of the Internet, the consolidation of old, established mass media, and the combination of the two. The merger of CBS and Viacom represents the latest and biggest in a series of "old media" combinations. These consolidations would not have been possible without the deregulatory turn in mass media policy that began with the Fowler Commission in the Reagan era and was codified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This deregulatory turn and the consolidations it has permitted have led to a public debate about the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's or Commission's) role in industry structure. Starting with the shared premise that the FCC is taking an increasingly market-facilitative role, commentators have applauded or criticized the impact of that approach on the mass media. This Essay seeks to put the Commission's current structural approach in fuller perspective. It contends that instead of taking a single, deregulatory course, the Commission is engaged in a multipronged approach to structural regulation of the mass media. This multivalent design has a deregulatory component, a regulatory counterweight, and a spectrum policy aspect. The regulatory counterweight in turn has two elements. One is explicit FCC rules that limit deregulation. The other element is voluntary public interest commitments by the regulated industries in response to FCC-articulated concerns. This Essay identifies the hard questions that face both sides of the existing regulatory debate and, having provided an alternative account of ...