Dartblog

Two opposing views courtesy of The Wall Street Journal’s always-interesting Reply All feature.

Mon avis? You either have government regulation or you don’t. By rights, satellite radio companies should have been free to congeal and launch space rockets all on their own. With a half-dozen such companies, all competing for the ears of America’s hundred million possible subscribers, prices would be low and quality would be high. Instead, the Federal Communications Commission invented the power to regulate how many satellite radio companies may exist. The FCC decided upon two. Amazingly, this duopoly turned out to provide nearly identical services at identical prices and with probably-identical costs. Besides increasing price, the merger probably won’t change the consumer experience much. The market, constrained by government regulation, has nowhere to go. There is, in other words, no hope for innovation, whether the two firms merge or not. Instead of wringing its hands over the merger, the government should deregulate satellite radio.