Time and again, the remedy sought and won has been to separate ownership of the medium from production of the message. Separate the theater chains from the movie producers, the television networks from the sitcom studios, the phone companies from the electronic databases. An occasional smart-aleck points out that most towns have a single newspaper, whose printing press should therefore be treated as a monopoly medium, but newspapers have beaten down that idea quickly enough. How much longer they will succeed is unclear. The appeal is being heard by the same court that proclaimed free-speech rights for cable companies a decade ago, in a decision that triggered a great boom in cable programming.
Videocassettes offer a new distribution medium for movies.
Metropolitan-area telephone networks and cellular systems are proliferating. The old antitrust arguments for suspending First Amendment freedoms just don't pass the laugh test anymore. But there is never a sure thing in U.S. courts, and, Abrams and Tribe notwithstanding, the Bell companies may yet lose it all. Whichever side persuades the three-judge panel, further hearings are possible before the court of appeals sitting as a whole, and then perhaps before the Supreme Court. The phone companies are pushing for relief in Congress and from the FCC as well, looking to capture islands of regulatory relief one by one if they have to.