Re: Corperate radio/Clear Channel

["A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

On 9 May 2001,  Dan Billings wrote:

> Good point.  Not to get off subject, but I would say this doesn't happen
> because deregulation usally has positive results.

Actually, it's had rather mixed results.  Bank deregulation was a major 
cause of the Savings and Loan crisis.  Airline deregulation has been 
leading to increasingly bad airline service.  Lowering the drinking age to 
18 in the 1970s resulted in large increases in alcohol use among under-18 
high school students.  Which resulted in re-regulating by increasing the 
drinking age back to 21.  But getting the genie back in the bottle hasn't 
been easy.

Elimination of rent control in Massachusetts has resulted in increasing 
homelessness, and as a side-effect, increasing difficulty in evicting 
anyone.  I don't see rent control coming back any time soon, but I'm at a 
loss to see what good has come of its elimination.  It certainly hasn't 
encouraged property maintenance.  But then, the notion that landlords 
didn't do maintenance because of rent control was always a bogus argument.

This, actually, is an example of deregulating and re-regulating.  Federal 
rent control existed during and after World War II.  It was followed by 
state-level control in Massachusetts for a couple more years, into the 
1950s.  Rent control reappeared in Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, 
Somerville, and Lynn in 1970.  It lasted only a couple of years in Lynn, a 
few more years (till 1978, I think) in Somerville, and until more recently 
in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge.

Federal rent control also existed for a time in 1971, as part of Nixon's 
wage and price controls that year.
 
> I also think that the companies that have invested millions of dollars
> legally in reaction to a change in government policy would have a good
> argument that it is not fair to force them to sell stations at what would
> end up being fire sale prices.  Millions of dollars of investor money would
> be lost.

That is a problem.  Government re-regulation would probably have to take 
the form of a gradual phase-in.  Which would have the further problem 
that, assuming a political majority in favor of re-regulation could be 
cobbled together, there would be plenty of time for the political winds to 
shift against it before it could get very far.
 
> I think the only thing that is likely to change the current situation would
> be a market change that, as Mr. Stassberg has suggested, would cause the
> house cards or house of debt that many of these companies are built on to
> collaspse.  It is not as far fetched as it may seem.  Look at the dot coms.
> A change in market perception of an industry can change stock prices
> dramatically and quickly.

Or continued drop in listeners.
 
> I think you are too cynical on this point.  Politicians will go against
> contributors if it is an issue that a large percentage of the people really
> care about.  

This is true, but as contributors become increasingly powerful, it takes a 
greater and greater groundswell of public opinion to get them to change. 


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 A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                        617.367.0468
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