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Cable Carr age D sputes |

provisions so that broadband service providers could not discriminate against
content producers (see http://www.savetheinternet.com/=coalition).

ConCLusion

A market-oriented consensus has driven communications policy since the
FCC began deregulating cable television in the late 1970s. According to this
consensus, new digital technologies hold the promise of solving public interest
issues from expanding opportunities for local expression to uplifting the waste-
land of popular commercial television, as long as the government steps out of
the way to allow the “free market” to develop these new technologies. But in the
wake of the failed market-oriented policies of the Telecommunications Act of
1996 that produced high prices, media conglomerates, and little competition,
this consensus can be challenged through remembering that the property status
of communications technologies is socially determined and open to contesta-
tion. From distant signal importation in the 1950s, local broadcast carriage in
the 1960s, public access channels in the 1970s, rate regulations in the 1990s, and
debates over video franchising jurisdictions and net neutrality in the 2000s, the
lessons remain. Solutions require more than market-oriented approaches. Best
practices have required regulatory frameworks where local, state, and federal
governments; industry leaders; independent program producers; labor groups;
public interest organizations; and concerned citizens have had a say in how com-
munications technologies develop.

see also À La Carte Cable Pricing; Alternative Media in the United States;
Conglomeration and Media Monopolies; Digital Divide; Media Reform; Net
Neutrality; Online Digital Film and Television; Pirate Radio; Public Access Tele-
vision; Public Broadcasting Service; Regulating the Airwaves.

Further reading: Aufderheide, Patricia. Communications Policy and the Public Interest: The
Telecommunications Act of 1996. New York: Guilford, 1999; Brown, Justin. “Digital Must-
Carry and the Case for Public Television.” Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 15 (Fall
2005): 74–109; Cooper, Mark. Cable Mergers, Monopoly Power and Price Increases. Wash-
ington, DC: Consumer’s Union, 2003, http://www.consumersunion.org/pdf/CFA103.
pdf; Gershon, Richard A. “Pay Cable Television: A Regulatory History.” Communications
and the Law 12, no. 2 (June 1990): 13–26; Horwitz, Robert. The Irony of Regulatory Re-
form: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989; Le Duc, Don R. Cable Television and the FCC: A Crisis in Media Control.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973; McChesney, Robert W. “Media Policy Goes
to Main Street: The Uprising of 2003.” The Communication Review 7 (2004): 223–58;
Parsons, Patrick R., and Robert M. Frieden. The Cable and Satellite Television Industries.
Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998; Parsons, Patrick. Cable Television and the First Amend-
ment. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1987; Shapiro, Andrew L. “Aiding the Final
Push of the Digital Transition.” Cardozo Public Law, Policy and Ethics Journal 5 (Fall
2006): 339–77; Sloan Commission on Cable Communications. On the Cable: The Televi-
sion of Abundance. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971; Smith, Ralph Lee. The Wired Nation:
Cable TV, the Electronic Communications Highway. New York: Harper and Row, 1972;
Snider, J. H. “Multi-Program Must-Carry for Broadcasters: Will It Mean No Public In-
terest Obligations for DTV?” New America Foundation Spectrum Series Issue Brief no. 13