It's because top-down-style regulation is so 20th-century, so over.
Consider the uproar in Canada currently over a "trash radio" station, a la Howard Stern.
Canadian regulators are gonna close the station down.
If this station were an internet radio station, more of which appear every day, it wouldn't even be an issue.
That's because the internet takes pirate radio to the next level, and makes it possible for one person, working alone and totally under the radar, to do what used to take a ton of equipment and power back in the day, when pirate broadcast radio stations were the big controversy.
Just wait till internet TV gets easy to do.
In the meantime, read Ian Austen's interesting story, which appeared in yesterday's New York Times, about the rise - and imminent fall - of CHOI-FM, broadcasting for the time being out of Quebec City, Canada:
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Trash Radio Puts Canadian Station in Jeopardy
To turn around its money-losing last-place radio station in Quebec City, Genex Communications used a familiar formula.
Genex brought in program hosts with a talent for provocative, lewd and offensive commentaries.
But the trash radio format that transformed CHOI-FM into a profitable market leader may have led to its demise.
Last week, the Canadian broadcast regulator said it would not renew the station's broadcasting license, a move that was likely to force CHOI to close by the end of next month.
The unusual decision by the regulator, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission, immediately provoked widespread criticism as a limitation on free speech.
"It's with great reluctance we do this because we are all supporters of freedom of expression," said Charles M. Dalfen, chairman of the commission.
"This wasn't about controversial programming. This was about abusive programming."
The main source of CHOI's trouble is a morning show whose host currently is Jean-Francois Fillion.
Article comments
1 - Nyx
Tv, radio, these are dead paradigms.
You can do more than either with the web. The problem is people are still thinking in the old words. Those words limit what you can do with the medium.
2 - Shark
from Shark's Dictionary:
Internet: (noun) 1) Disinformation at the speed of light; 2) a tool that gives people the illusion that what they do and/or say actually matters. 3) an information mode in which design becomes more important than content, where illiterate graphic designers replace literate editors in maintaining the output and inventory of a collective cultural legacy; 4) Digital graffitti scrawled on an imaginary bathroom wall in some empty back alley just off the information highway.