e at a moments notice as seen last year with the dramatic fall of Internet stocks. A huge hurdle to be overcome by any company in the media business is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC is an independent United States government agency, directly responsible to Congress. The FCC was established by the Communications Act of 1934 and is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC's jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions. After the FCC published its approval of the AOL/Time Warner merger the Chairman of the FCC release his own separate statement regarding his view of the merger. Our review process has fundamental problems. It is increasingly morphing the FCC into an antitrust authority, duplicating the analysis of other more competent authorities. Of course, we have independent authority to review these combinations, but we have wide latitude to decide how searching and how broad such a review need be and I believe we have moved much too far into the domain of other government institutions, namely the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. The problem this presents to the business community is that when mergers of this size are approved it sets a standard that is very hard to turn around in future decisions. Which creates a situation where more and more companies are merging to compete with huge mega-merged-media companies that control more and more of the assets that are out there. Rumors are already flying around that Yahoo is talking to media companies about possible mergers. But the company has denied rumors that it plans to buy a media company to compete with rival AOL.Under those circumstances the business community will suffer due to the lack of diversity in the market. In a situation where a company controls 65% of a market, opposed to a comp...
