In the telecom business, too, small is beautiful

A few thoughts on industry consolidation and censorship

Perhaps an under-appreciated aspect of this story is its connection with decentralist criticisms of enormous scale: the trend of absurd-scale media industry consolidation and centralization through mergers has been instrumental in enabling the Trump government’s move to get Jimmy Kimmel off the TV. Consider that a handful of corporate powerhouses now hold a significant share of the local broadcasters across the country, and that these giants must supplicate for permission when they want to grow even larger. As the corporations have grown larger, industries more concentrated, the government’s leverage has grown, too. As those who have practiced in the area of federal administrative law know well, there is never a neat separation between the business considerations and the legal and regulatory considerations.

We can easily observe that economic centralization concentrates control of what will come across your TV screen in fewer hands, making political manipulation and negotiation more likely and more harmful. The need for licenses and deal approvals creates points of real strategic leverage, where the threats of the government are a mechanism for compelling self-censorship. Larger-scale deals amplify this nasty effect by reducing the number (in absolute and relative terms) of independent agents operating within the system, the organizations and individuals that might be able to push back against government censorship. So we get the ability to press a nakedly partisan agenda at scales that would have been and still should be unimaginable. This dynamic, where industry consolidation and corporate mergers increase the power of the state, is observed across sectors and contexts. The Trump administration’s open censorship of Jimmy Kimmel shows how structural changes in the corporate economy – fewer and fewer players across sectors for decades on end – facilitate and arguably entail new modes of censorship and subjective control, even as many will continue to see this as legitimate. The consolidation of the corporate media has dramatically expanded the tools available for malign political interference with the right of free speech and expression.

Few Americans are aware just how much diversity our country’s media ecosystem has lost during our lifetimes. The telecom sector has undergone extremely dramatic concentration and consolidation over the past several decades, with intensification continuing into this year. Without going into the details on recent deals and their implications, telecom consolidation yields fewer players who control larger shares of the infrastructure, services, and content-delivery channels, heightening concerns about harmful market power, less robust competition, and the increasing potential for political leverage. Consolidation reduces diversity in terms of folks’ backgrounds and their views; it weakens local communities and undermines plurality in the voices we have in media, making coordinated censorship and politically motivated programming decisions easier and more effective.

The Kimmel story is frustrating as it shows the kinds of vulnerability decentralists and anarchists have long anticipated and flagged (we never manage today to get around to the weaknesses or liabilities associated with dizzyingly massive scales, only their many miracles). What we are seeing is an attempt to use the power of the state to enforce ideological conformity and silence dissent as the mass scale—that is, exactly what it is the state’s job to do and what it has always done. Centralized, hierarchical structures enable top-down repression and they seek it out. This is indeed why they exist. Decentralized, federalized models of social organization offer resilience and freedom by maintaining the autonomy of the smaller group.

One of the most valuable insights of decentralist thinkers from Leopold Kohr and E.F. Schumacher to Kirkpatrick Sale has been that concentrating corporate power undermines community life and leads to manipulation and domination, often for short-term gain. When we give up local control, we suffer a reduced ability to organize and fight back, allowing cynical rulers to farm us. Human scale institutions are needed in media and communications no less than in other areas, if we are to stand up against the churning destruction machine of the authoritarian state and giant megacorporation – to stop this dynamic from continuing its organization of social, political and economic life in ways that are profoundly harmful to the people at the ground level.