The Supreme Court has significantly expanded the First Amendment free speech rights of corporations through decisions which ignore their power as sources of information, and concentrate instead on the rights of the public to receive the information corporations choose to provide. As the right to protected speech expands, so do the industries' claims for protection, such as the cable industry's call for the exclusion of all public speakers from the channels over which it exerts monopoly control. The Court has ignored that private monopoly power over news, TV programs, films, music, data processing, publishing and advertising by multinationals with huge resources and far-reaching interests reduces diversity by blocking out independent speakers and sources of information. In, the last decade, deregulation was also a significant force in the corporate takeover of public expression. Perhaps the deregulation policy with the most obvious effect was the abolition of the public interest standard in the regulation of television and radio.
Stations are now able to drop any pretense of public service and operate strictly for profit.
Deregulation also permitted a wave of mergers, which led to vertical and horizontal integration of culture industries, now dominated by fewer owners and more powerful companies. Cultural industries have both followed and fuelled other corporate drives to dominate world markets. Information industries circulate data and capital around the world, allowing them to change the international division of labor and to shift production sites worldwide. The cultural industries have also expanded internationally for their own direct material gain. Television networks pressure autonomous state-run broadcasting systems across Europe and the Soviet Union to include transnationally supplied broadcasting under threat of being bypassed with satellite or other technology.