When you merge the message with the medium, you make a messium

THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION saw it coming. In a stunning January 1974 report, the Nixon White House Cable Committee foretold that the new telecom platform known as cable would, eventually, be a monopoly service wherever it was offered. The committee, whose membership included Mitt Romney's dad, George, and which was staffed by a young Antonin Scalia, called for a "separation policy.” Its chief recommendation: Control of the cable medium should be separated from control of the messages on it. A federal mandate along these lines was urgently needed, the committee said: "If the achievement of a new relationship between government and the private cable medium is not anticipated but left to chance, the free flow of diverse information and ideas that is protected by the Constitution could be endangered.”

Nixon's plan fell victim to the lobbying efforts of the cable industry—powerful then, much more powerful now—on Capitol Hill. Today, the Cable Committee's predictions have come true: Both the cable and wireless industries, the transport networks on which everyone else rely, are fully mature, vertically integrated, and unruffled by competition. And they're planning to erect separate kingdoms.

Here’s how these plans are playing out this month: AT&T wants to go "direct to consumer," as a source of both original, exclusive shows and real-time-only exclusive content like sports and news. To get as much revenue as possible from perfectly targeted ads, they'd like to avoid middlemen and directly control data about everything you're doing and watching. As a step along this empire-enhancement path, AT&T is fighting the Department of Justice: AT&T wants to acquire Time Warner so as to control HBO, CNN, Warner Bros., and other key sources of original content, and the DOJ has sued to block the deal. AT&T wants sympathy for its "market disadvantage against vertically integrated video content suppliers like Amazon, Netflix, and Comcast/NBCU."

But there's a fundamental difference between the FANGs—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—and AT&T and Comcast. In America, AT&T and Comcast control the hardware used to transport information to subscribers. The vast majority of FANG revenues and strategies stem from the software, or content, business.

There is no need for a single company to control both the medium and the message. But once you allow transport networks like AT&T and Comcast to also own content, and then allow those transport networks to merge, consolidate, and divide markets among themselves, a lot of painful things happen to consumers. You get local monopolies with crushing power, high prices, and a reluctance to upgrade. That's what's happened in the US over the past four decades.

The $85 billion AT&T/Time Warner combination will make an already awful situation worse. AT&T will have enhanced power, in the form of Turner content, to make life miserable for any upstart transport provider, and will have heightened incentives to crush new forms of online content . But it's already an awful situation because past administrations have essentially allowed vertically integrated exclusivity, giving these behemoth transport providers both the incentive and ability to beat up on every other kind of actor in the business of bits.

As the Nixon White House knew, and today's DOJ understands, writing a boatload of rules to constrain the animal spirits of private carriers is the path of greater regulation. (Also: when it comes to basic infrastructure, words don't work when commercial incentives point in a different direction). Nixon's deregulatory heart felt that "separation policy" was the only way to go.

You can be confident that AT&T, Spectrum, and Comcast will accelerate production of original, exclusive programming soon. (Here's AT&T's lineup for 2018; Spectrum is heading in the same direction; Comcast will probably seek to buy a production studio like Warner Bros., whether or not the AT&T/Time Warner combination is allowed.

Allowing the AT&T/Time Warner deal to go through will hasten the arrival of the terrible consequences of allowing transport to be integrated with content: separate tribal nations of exclusive content that you can access only if you've signed up for the right tribe. Your tribe will know everything about you and it will be very difficult to switch to another one. Rather than the free flow of information and lowered barriers to entry dreamt of at the birth of the commercial internet, which assumed that carriers would be utility transport providers, we're ending up with closed worlds of stuff with a little "public internet" on the side.

The good part of this story: Those closed worlds, huge and shiny as they are, are brittle. They can be undermined when a reasonably attractive alternative gains traction. That's why open municipal fiber networks are so important and why these incumbents will fight them so fiercely once they become a real threat. Human beings want connection even more than they want shiny content, and if it's available in essentially unlimited quantities over fiber optic networks at a reasonable price (because different retail providers use those same transport networks to compete for customer affection, thus driving down prices), they'll jump ship.

It would take too much litigation now to force separation on the incumbent carriers. The only move that makes sense is to call for the construction of a nationwide transport-only alternative using the municipal efforts going forward today as models and inputs.

Nixon is looking reasonable: What's at risk is nothing less than our national interest in freedom of expression.