Regulation, Media Mergers and the Consumers' Interest

In letters to the editor, Mercatus Center’s Thierer argues that Leo Hindery Jr. gets it right when noting, "Consumers and viewers won't gain a thing from regulators blocking the media-distribution industry's natural evolution." While Penn State’s Brown says Hindery’s argument's premise is that the industry will end in a true monopoly and that these mergers (as well as earlier and future ones) are just part of the inevitable, final state. This is a deterministic argument made with no substantive evidence or logic.