How Media Monopolies Are Undermining Democracy and Threatening Net Neutrality

A Q&A with Mark Lloyd, professor of communications at USC’s Annenberg School and former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission from 2009-2012.

In the interview, Lloyd discusses media consolidation, saying, "The big challenge is that we have an FCC that is not really even looking at the impact of media consolidation on what it means to local communities, on what it means to whether or not folks in those local communities actually get the service that they need. So one of the things that I wrote about before, which is sort of obscure and sort of hard to figure out, is that there is this rule that local radio stations actually have to be in the local radio stations that they operate; it’s called the main control room....what’s happening now is not only that these rules are sort of vague and not really particularly well enforced; it’s that we have an administration that has sent signals to the broadcasters, to the telecommunications companies that provide Internet service, that these rules will not be enforced. They’ve been sent a very clear signal: you can do what it is that you want to do if you have a license to operate, if you are a broad band provider, you can do whatever you want, we’re not going to enforce net neutrality, whether it’s determined to be legal or not legal. This FCC is not going to enforce it."