A couple weeks ago I wrote on another website about my first impressions of the iPhone upon buying my wife the new Apple/AT&T device for Christmas:

After two days, I finally pried the iPhone from her white knuckle fingers so I could give it a full test-drive myself without the Apple Store guy looking over my shoulder wondering why I don't just buy the thing. The bottom line is that the mobile Internet is now real. Mobile video will not be an eye-straining experience for teenage geeks but a mass phenomenon. The video quality and maps are out-of-this-world. At Christmas dinner I showed my grandmother the device, and starting from a broad nation-wide road map of the U.S. I quickly in just a few swipes of my thumb and forefinger had zoomed into a satellite shot of her home, with an identifiable friend's car in the driveway. She was totally dumbfounded. By now we've all used these simple Google and YouTube apps thousands of times on PCs, but the quality of the visual experience on a mobile device is astounding. It means more of us will be connected to the Net more of the time, using rich apps, not just talk or e-mail, and thus generate large amounts of new IP traffic. Some wives claim to be "NFL widows." For this Christmas/New Year's week at least, I am an iPhone widower.

So I was not too surprised to see it reported yesterday that

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times.

We will soon release a new study on video, rich media, and Internet traffic, which details these powerful mobile video advances, among other network and content innovations.

.. would free shipping for books be illegal! According to , the French impose limits on price discounts for books in the form of restrictions on free shipping on book purchases. Amazon is apparently fighting the law. Good for them. Here's the beginning of the story...

The online retailer Amazon.com said Monday that it would pay €1,000 a day in fines, rather than comply with a court ruling upholding French limits on price discounts for books. The company decided to pay the daily fine worth $1,500 rather than eliminate its offer of free shipping on book purchases, said Xavier Garambois, director of Amazon's French subsidiary.

"We are determined to follow every avenue available to us to overturn this law," Garambois said. The company appealed the ruling Friday. Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of the company, based in Seattle, was equally defiant in a weekend e-mail message to French customers. "As unbelievable as it appears, the free delivery of Amazon.fr is threatened," he wrote in the French-language note. "France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal," the Bezos e-mail concluded, inviting consumers to sign an online petition. By Monday evening, more than 120,000 people had clicked in favor of maintaining free delivery.

This morning in New York City, social networking website operator announced a major joint effort with 49 state Attorneys General aimed at better protecting children online. (Coverage at CNet, NYT and Forbes). At a joint press conference, MySpace and the AGs unveiled a “Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Safety” involving expanded online safety tools, improved education efforts, and law enforcement cooperation. They also agreed to create an industry-wide Internet Safety Technical Task Force to study online safety tools, including a review of online identity authentication technology.

Generally speaking, the agreement is step forward for online safety. Indeed, many of the principles in the agreement could form a potential model “code of conduct” that other social networking sites could adopt. In a report I authored for the Progress & Freedom Foundation in August 2006, I argued that it was vital for companies and trade associations to take steps such as this to avoid the specter of government regulation or censorship:

All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon—and in a collective fashion—calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by [a] wide variety of operators...

In particular, this code of conduct proposal called for companies to make specific pledges regarding improved online safety tools, expanded education / media literacy efforts, and ongoing assistance to law enforcement regarding investigations of online crimes.

Why have markets been so volatile recently, and even over the past decade, dating back to the Asian crisis of 1997-98?

It's pretty simple, argues David Malpass, chief economist at Bear Stearns, in a superb article this morning. The value of the dollar -- the globe's key reserve currency and unit of account -- has been swinging wildly about. The dollar is the foundation of enterprise. A foundation must be sturdy and stable, or the investments, businesses, and trade we build on top of it can sway or even collapse. The dollar is central to all U.S. and global commerce.

A couple of corporations or trade associations have started blogs about technology policy that are worth checking out. Here's a partially list of some of the ones I follow in my Bloglines account. I'm interested in hearing from readers about others that should be added to the list. Perhaps we should add a new section to our blogroll to help readers keep tabs on corporate tech blogs like these.

Google - Google Public Policy Blog
Cisco - Cisco High Tech Policy Blog
Cable (NCTA) - Cable Tech Talk
Verizon - Verizon Policy Blog

"Cable-TV Industry Girds for New Threats." That's the title of an article today from Ben Charny of the Wall Street Journal, who is reporting on what he's seeing at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and how it is upending the traditional TV market:

"[A]s evidenced this week by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas... thanks to the Internet becoming a bigger distributor of entertainment, and new gadgets and other developments that make it easier to show the Internet's content on TVs. ... As the Internet becomes a larger provider of video, and technology makers ease the flow of that content to television sets, it threatens the cable and satellite industries. Currently, the number of subscriber dropouts remains relatively small, according to cable and satellite operators, but anecdotal evidence suggests those affected by a souring U.S. economy are more inclined to keep their less-expensive Internet services than their cable-TV subscriptions.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was out at the show this week, too. Hopefully he was watching and listening so his outrageous regulatory "war on cable" can finally come to an end.

I just realized that I forgot to blog last month about the release of the Family Online Safety Institute's (FOSI) "State of Online Safety Report 2008." As Stephen Balkam, CEO of FOSI, notes in the preface, the report is "[an] attempt to take an international snap shot of the incredibly diverse and innovative attempts to keep kids safe online, while also respecting free expression." It features chapters on 9 different countries, including the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Mexico, Canada, Austria, Netherlands, and Belgium.

Each chapter was authored by an online safety expert from those countries. Stephen Balkam was kind enough to invite me to submit the chapter on the state of affairs in the United States and it is included as Chapter 1 in the report. My contribution is based largely on material pulled from my big PFF report, Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.

FOSI hopes to improve and expand the report in coming years to give analysts, policymakers, the press, and other interested parties an in-depth feel for the state of play in many other countries. But it already serves as a uniquely importantly resource for those who want a snapshot of online safety efforts internationally. Here's more of what Stephen had to say in the preface of the report about the current state of global online safety efforts:

Obsession over the trade deficit is one of the most dangerous pastimes of economists, politicians, and the press. It fuels anti-trade sentiment and tempts people to close our borders to capital and trade. This morning we hear that November's trade deficit "swelled" -- "widening to the biggest gap in 14 months."

Lou Dobbs and other anti-trade figures lead most people to believe that the trade deficit is the result of unfairly inexpensive imports from China. Protectionists and many manufacturers urge a weaker dollar to supposedly compensate for supposedly artificially weak foreign currencies and make American products more competitive. Well, over the last few years, the Fed has complied, and the protectionists have gotten their wish: a much weaker dollar. We've even seen American exports rise smartly. But guess what, none of that has helped the trade deficit. You can't get something for nothing, certainly not by manipulating the value of your currency.

Why has the trade deficit kept rising even as the dollar weakened and exports grew? Because by far the largest component of the rising deficit these last few years has been spiking petroleum imports. An inflationary dollar juiced oil prices to record highs. So foreigners could buy American products a bit more cheaply, but Americans had to buy oil at $70, $80, and now $90. Foreign beneficiaries are now attempting to reinvest those petrodollars back into the U.S. -- see Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, etc. -- if we will let them.

The simple rule of international economics is that you can't change the terms of trade by changing the unit of account. In other words, you can't increase competitiveness by devaluing your currency. Short-term gains are met or even outweighed by short-term losses, and over the long-term it's a wash or possibly an inflationary disaster.

America has enjoyed -- yes, enjoyed -- a trade deficit for 350 of the last 400 years. All it means is we've been a destination for capital. A trade deficit means a capital surplus. The last two times we "achieved" a trade surplus were in the recessions of 1990-91 and 1981-82. In my dictionary, trade surplus is a dirty word.

Lesson one: forget the trade deficit.

Lesson two: if you can't follow lesson one, remember that a trade deficit equals a capital surplus.

Stacking the Deck in the D-Block Auction Never was a Good Idea

If bidding in the upcoming FCC 700 MHz auction can be likened to placing bets in a game of Texas Hold ‘em, a player for whom the deck appeared to be stacked just cashed-out and walked away, mid-hand. As has been widely reported, FrontLine Wireless announced on January 8th that it is “closed for business,” reportedly because it was unable to attract sufficient investment.

FrontLine had been expected to be one of the leading bidders for a license in the D block spectrum, which will come with strings such as requiring joint public-safety use, nationwide geographic coverage and a public safety veto over what could and could not go on the network. Indeed, the very existence of Frontline hinged on winning the D-block, and the company had worked closely with the FCC on crafting a set of rules for the spectrum that were all but tailor-made for Frontline’s business plan. Nonetheless, even with the deck effectively stacked in its favor, the market was not willing to bankroll FrontLine’s play.

FrontLine’s announcement that it has folded should come as no surprise. Far from being an occasion for mourning, however, the foundering of FrontLine hopefully signals the end of what has been a tragically flawed experiment in the D-block from the outset.

Yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, General Motors chief executive Rick Wagoner on the future of automobiles and technology and hyped the concept of “autonomous driving.” "Autonomous driving means that someday you could do your e-mail, eat breakfast, do your makeup, and watch a video while commuting to work," Wagoner said. “In other words, you could do all the things you do now while commuting to work but do them safely.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. Matter of fact, I’m obsessed with technology and A/V gadgets, and I have covered tech policy issues for a living a 3 different think tanks over the past 16 years. I love all things tech. But I love driving more. A lot more. I have been fanatical about my sports cars ever since I was a kid. From my first car--a 1979 "Smokey & the Bandit" Pontiac TransAm--to my 86 Mustang GT, to my 90 Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo, my BMWs (two M3s and an 850i) all the way to my current 2005 Lotus Elise--I have been completely obsessed with cars and the joys of motoring throughout my life. And the idea that we’ll all one day soon be driving to work in the equivalent of personal subway cars makes me a little sad because it means the joy of driving might me lost in coming generations.

I wonder if my son will grow up with the same passion for motoring that I have, and that my dad had before me. (I’m certainly going to have something to say about it!) And I wonder if, a generation from now, “driver’s education” classes will consist of little more than downloading a user name and password for your computer-car.

On the upside, I suppose I could see the advantage of making the driving experience fully automated for all those idiots on the road who really do engage in risky behaviors in their cars, like “e-mail, eat[ing] breakfast, do[ing] your makeup, and watch[ing] a video while commuting to work,” as Wagoner suggests. I hate those SOBs. They give me nightmares because, at a minimum, I fear what they might do to my car when they are not looking at the road. Worse yet, I think of the danger they pose to pedestrians (like my kids). So, perhaps a Jetsons-mobile for these morons will be an effective way to reduce accidents and traffic fatalities.

But as for myself, I will pass on “autonomous driving,” thank you very much. I want to be fully in control of my motoring experience forever more. Especially behind the wheel of my beloved Lotus Elise!

Key to "global innovation" -- the name of our new program here at PFF -- are global energy markets. Energy is the basis for life and it fuels all innovation and growth. Most innovations improve energy efficiency -- whether it's an innovation in transportation or information processing, new technologies allow us to do more with less. More output per unit input. But overall, as Peter Huber brilliantly demonstrated in The Bottomless Well, new efficiencies breed wealth, which leads to higher aggregate energy consumption. Global innovation, therefore, requires growing energy supplies.

The whole discussion over the "energy crisis" these past few years has been plagued by a fundamental misunderstanding. The conventional view, regurgitated yet again by Paul Krugman this morning, is that we're running out of oil at the same time Asia is using more of the stuff. Thus, one-hundred-dollar oil.

No doubt the second half of that equation is true, as far as it goes. The Chinese and Indians are big new petroleum consumers. But the prices of nearly all commodities and metals are at or close to all-time highs. Coffee, cattle, carbon-fiber, steel. A decade ago China produced hardly any steel and now it churns out more than any other nation. As demand for most of these commodities has risen, so have the supplies. Increased secular demand from Asia (versus inflationary demand), in other words, might account for a marginal increase in commodity prices, but not the 200-300% jolts we've seen these last few years.

The first half of the conventional equation, moreover -- that we're running out of oil -- is not even close to accurate. There's plenty of oil, and we're discovering ingenius ways to find, pump, and refine more of it all the time, from drilling miles under the ocean bed to cooking tar sands in Canada.

No, the chief cause of high oil prices (and high coffee, milk, copper, steel, and real-estate prices) is the value of the U.S. dollar, which has been weakened by an excessively loose Federal Reserve. Eighteen months ago I called this largely overlooked but crucial factor "The Elephant in the Barrel." That was in the last "energy crisis" of the summer of 2006. Most people dismissed this central monetary factor in all prices at the time, but now the argument has gained much wider support. The Wall Street Journal this morning does a good job explaining this dollar-oil link:

Since 2001 the dollar price of oil and gold have run in almost perfect tandem (see nearby chart). The gold price has risen 239% since 2001, while the oil price has risen 267%. This means that if the dollar had remained "as good as gold" since 2001, oil today would be selling at about $30 a barrel, not $99. Gold has traditionally been a rough proxy for the price level, so the decline of the dollar against gold and oil suggests a U.S. monetary that is supplying too many dollars.

We would add that the dollar price of nearly all commodities -- from wheat to corn to copper to silver -- are also surging, a further sign of a weakening currency. On Wednesday alone the price of wheat and soybeans increased 3.4% and 2.8%, respectively. That follows a 75% increase in their price in 2007 -- which ran ahead of the oil price, which gained a mere 57% for the year. Neither OPEC nor China caused food commodity prices to rise like this. The main culprit here is a global loss of confidence in Federal Reserve policy and the dollar.

We should pursue all sorts of new entrepreneurial energy technologies -- nukes, solar, hybrids, wind (well, maybe not wind), and, yes, more petroleum and hopefully cleaner coal -- but any rational energy policy must begin by understanding the real price of oil.

As it watches the hypergrowth of the surrounding hypernations, Japan becomes insecure about the quality of its educational system, long considered one of the world's best. So, says the New York Times, the nation is rushing to emulate Indian teaching techniques:

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.

And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.

At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian, and classroom posters depict animals out of Indian tales. The kindergarten students even color maps of India in the green and saffron of its flag.

U.S. public schools could learn a lot from any of these Asian nations, or the Europeans, for that matter. And American parents could surely learn something about valuing education from their Asian counterparts. Of course, Asia doesn't have all the answers. In fact, most of their recent success is because they are adopting our capitalist economic ideas.

But in the meantime, as we struggle to improve our schools, what does the U.S. think it is doing by strictly limiting legal immigration and visas for supersmart people from all over the world? Japan has to focus exclusively on indigenous education because it allows virtually no immigration. Fortunately, America can rely on both home-grown and imported human capital -- at least in theory. At the moment, however, we don't seem to be nurturing either source of smarts like we should.

I've just begun Amy Chua's new book , which argues that hyperpowers rise through tolerance and meritocracy -- and fall when they insulate themselves (become intolerant) to outside people and ideas. After the Introduction, at least, it rings pretty true.

Who would Patriot fans have to blame if their cable operator did not carry the final game of the New England team's undefeated regular season? Look no further than the NFL offices.

The NFL is the most financially successful league in the world. NFL franchises are worth, on average, about a billion dollars each, and five of them are worth quite a bit more than that. One might imagine that a league whose aggregate value exceeds the GDP of Iceland and Jordan combined would be content. One would be wrong.

No, the NFL is not making enough, apparently, merely filling stadiums (many of which were built with taxpayer subsidies), hawking team wares, and marketing TV rights to broadcast and cable networks. Now the NFL would like to wring a few more golden eggs from the goose by forcing non-fans to pay for televised games. Even those accustomed to the rich getting richer must find the inherent unfairness of the NFL’s power sweep offensive.

I found Jaron Lanier's provocatively titled Discover magazine essay "Long Live Closed-Source Software!" quite interesting. Taking a look at the development of open source software over the past 25 years, Lanier concludes that:

Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances. Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Before you write me that angry e-mail, please know I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But a politically correct dogma holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation, and that claim is not borne out by the facts.

The problem, Lanier argues, is that...

The open-source software community is simply too turbulent to focus its tests and maintain its criteria over an extended duration, and that is a prerequisite to evolving highly original things. There is only one iPhone, but there are hundreds of Linux releases. A closed-software team is a human construction that can tie down enough variables so that software becomes just a little more like a hardware chip—and note that chips, the most encapsulated objects made by humans, get better and better following an exponential pattern of improvement known as Moore’s law.

Since I'm new around here, I thought I'd introduce myself.

For the last decade, I've studied technology and economics, applying any lessons learned both to investing and to public policy. I spent eight years working with George Gilder at the Gilder Technology Report, a monthly investment strategy letter and online community focused on semiconductors, fiber optics, and wired and wireless communications. Simultaneously I was a fellow at the Discovery Institute, where I researched and wrote about the Internet, telecom policy, China, and the global economy.

All the while, I'd closely followed the work here at PFF. Jeff Eisenach, Adam Thierer, Jay Keyworth, and others were always key resources I turned to on digital economy and telecom policy matters. Now, I've joined PFF to launch a new program to study the global economy.

In 2007, world GDP topped $50 trillion. China and India are on the move. Many U.S. companies find that ROW -- rest of world -- sales now top the domestic U.S. market. Capital, labor, and ideas now circle the globe at the speed of light. Financial markets and supply-lines are more integrated than ever. Some three billion people are connecting to the modern economy for the first time. New players are creating new ideas and new enterprises in new places.

As globalization allows entrepreneurs and companies to reach across or obliterate national boundaries, offering unprecedented opportunities to corporations (new markets and talent), the middle class (cheap products and rising living standards), and the poor (new technology and wealth) alike, it also creates a whole new set of challenges.

• Globalization also empowers governments to reach across the world and touch firms previously outside their jurisdiction.

• Nations outsource not only their factories but also their monetary policies, leading to charges of “currency manipulation,” proposed tariffs, and the threat of a trade war.

• The intangible nature of intellectual property, which makes up an ever larger portion of the world’s output and wealth, adds a new layer of complexity to global governance.

• Rising global wealth leads many to warn of impending energy shortages, zero-sum oil wars, and global warming. Proposals to limit energy usage continue to gain traction.

• As inequality between the world’s rich and poor begins to decline, many assert that rising inequality in the U.S. is leaving millions of Americans behind.

• With so many large changes coming so fast, populist sentiment is on the rise. Many urge the closing of borders to people, capital, and trade.

Can America accept a world with new capitalist power centers, or will we engage in a protectionist backlash? Do we view foreign investment (aka the trade deficit) as a curse, or a blessing? Can we convince other regions that intrusive regulation of "foreign" competitors is not the path to prosperity? Can we provide a stable platform for world commerce through stable monetary arrangements? Can we agree on ways to protect often intangible intellectual property and thus encourage global innovation? Or will the globe regress into protectionist battles wielding the self-destructive weapons of tariffs, subsidies, and devaluations, or the mercantilist phantoms of energy hoarding, IP theft, and aggressive "antitrust."

These are the topics we will study. We think they will be at or near the center of the debate for the next few decades. In addition, we all know the global Internet is changing the economy, education, politics, and media in profound ways, and we will continue our intense study of Internet phenomena as well. In the coming weeks, for example, I'll release a new paper estimating the growth of Internet traffic and documenting the technologies and applications that are driving this "exaflood."

I'm eager, with my new colleagues, to go exploring these fascinating frontiers.

--Bret Swanson

Movie critic Richard Roeper of "Ebert & Roeper at the Movies" has a new video commentary up with some sensible thinking about the issue of regulating in-flight entertainment.

As I mentioned in this previous post, legislation has been proposed in the House of Representatives that would regulate "violent entertainment" shown on airline flights. Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) and several co-sponsors argue that a "Family Friendly Flights Act" is needed to protect kids from such fare while they are flying.

Roeper argues that "sometimes the content in these movies is a little too violent" and that the studios "should probably be a little more judicious in their editing." But Roeper is generally against regulation and doesn't think we need separate seating areas for kids on flights. He points out that adding another distinct seating section to airplane is just going to slow down boarding times. "It would be better if the studios themselves do a little bit better job cut[ting] the violent content so that kids don't need to see people getting shot and car crashes and all that stuff, but let's not get Congress involved."

I agree. As I pointed out in an editorial for the City Journal a few months ago, it would be a mistake to empower federal regulators to become "Long-Range Censors" since many better alternatives to regulation exist.

Juniper CEO Scott Kriens tells the San Jose Mercury News the exaflood is coming.

In pure mathematical terms, the imminence of an exaflood is almost a demonstrable fact.

But Kriens also agrees that if we invest enough in new network technologies, the exaflood -- a deluge of new Internet traffic generated chiefly by new video applications -- is not a problem but an opportunity.

The thing I don't agree with is that it is therefore going to cause a meltdown. I think it will be handled without the trauma that some people project. But it is real.

Here's my article that got this exaflood talk started in the first place.

utopia: [yoo-toh-pee-uh]
n.
"nowhere."
"an impractical, idealistic scheme."
"an imaginary place."

The fate of the project seemed preordained, no?

I agree with Adam's analysis. One sympathizes just a bit with the officials behind this well-intended public project, especially in a sparsely populated geography. Broadband bridges in Utah seem more useful, at least superficially, than Alaskan bridges to nowhere. But in the fast-moving world of broadband technology and digital media, the hardware and software -- and especially the content business plans -- change so fast and are so experimental that tax-funded public works projects are unlikely to succeed. The large capital and operating expenses of these networks require long-term commitments from well-capitalized companies -- companies large enough to make mistakes and still recover. Beyond Utopia's big network investments, it had a particular "open content" business model that may someday arrive but hasn't so far. This isn't to say there aren't entrepreneurial entrants in niche markets, especially small-town wireless providers. But before we throw our hands up and turn over bleeding edge technology projects to a state or city bureaucracy, shouldn't we first remove federal and state barriers to private network investment and see how that works first? In the states that have deregulated telecom in the last few years, broadband investment -- both cable and telecom -- is booming.

I've been trying to keep tabs on the status of various municipal wi-fi experiments going on across the nation by posting local news reports about them whenever I see them. The results so far have not been encouraging, but this hasn't been that surprising since those of us who study these issues know that most wireline muni experiments failed too.

And speaking of failed wireline experiments, it appears there's another one that might soon be added to the list. The Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency--or "UTOPIA" as it is known--was created in 2002 by local Utah officials who wanted to bring high-speed Internet access to their communities. Eleven communities pledged roughly $200 million over 20 years to back the bonds needed to finance the construction of advanced fiber-optic facilities. Utilimately, the goal was to ensure inexpensive broadband for the masses at minimal cost to taxpayers.

But there are problems in paradise. According to by Steve Oberbeck of The Salt Lake Tribune:

[F]our years after 11 Utah cities... pledged to financially back the UTOPIA system, its finances are in shambles. Construction is behind schedule. Its top promoters have quit, and its newest chairman has uttered the unthinkable - that despite promises to the contrary, the cities that pledged their support eventually may have to pony up hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to prop up the system.

What went wrong?

In my 2004 book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership, I pointed out that mergers and acquisitions represent just one of many strategies media companies utilize to respond to consumer demand and new market challenges. Other strategies include spin-offs and line-of-business divestitures on the one hand, and new technological investments or expanded product or service offerings on the other.

But those other strategies never seem to attract the same amount of attention as mergers and acquisitions even though they are far more common. In fact, as media guru Ben Compaine correctly observes, “Break-ups and divestitures do not generally get front-page treatment.” Such stories usually get buried in papers and magazines, or get a small mention at the bottom a news website, if at all.

That's why I started this series of "media DE-consolidation series" of essays a few years ago. I wanted to highlight the other side of the story and show how the media marketplace is far more dynamic than critics care to admit. In fact, as FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell noted recently in an excellent speech on the true state of the media market, "Traditional media’s numbers are shrinking," and "The ironic truth is: in many cases, media consolidation has actually become media divestiture. Companies such as Disney, Citadel, Clear Channel and Belo actually have been shedding properties to raise capital for new ventures."

That's exactly right, and the many other entries in this series prove that point. We're in the midst of a massive wave of media divestitures and downsizing. And today we have another example with News Corp's announcement that it will be shedding 8 of its Fox-affiliated TV stations in mid-sized markets.