began providing incentives for cable networks to be built. And among these
incentives was a particularly lucrative asset -- monopoly control.

The argument of the cable industry in favor of monopoly was simple: We
need, they argued, incentives to risk the investment to build out cable TV.
That build-out would be worth it to us only if we could be certain to recover
our investment. This certainty would be adequately provided if we had
complete control over the programming on our network. If we get to pick
and choose the shows we run, and we get protected monopoly status in the
local markets we run cable for, then we will have sufficient incentive to
build out cable to secure our needs.

Not a bad deal, if you can get it. And even though "every major policy
study on how cable should be regulated recommended that cable operators
be required to provide at least some degree of non-discriminatory access to
unaffiliated program suppliers,"[10-9] Congress and the FCC ignored these rec-
ommendations. Cable was given control both over the physical infrastruc-
ture that built their network and over the code layer that made their network
run.

From our perspective, however, there should be something odd about
this decision. Telephones and television were both technologies that de-
pended upon wires. Yet just as the nation was resolving to limit the control
that the network owner had over one set of wires -- telephone -- it was in-
creasing the control the network owner would have over a different set of
wires -- cable. From our perspective, these different policies for the same
thing -- wires -- deserve an explanation, at least.

But at the time, telephones were as different from television as cars are
different from buggies. It was not obvious to legislators (or if it was, they
didn't let on) why the rules governing one should also govern the other. And
even if it was obvious to some, the commercial pressure for exceptionalism
was too great to resist. Just at the time America was coming to second-guess
its first great network monopoly (telephones), it embraced and supported
the construction of a second with the potential to be just as powerful.

So cable entered its golden years, which were brightened in the late
1970s only by the innovations of Ted Turner. Turner looked at cable and
saw a waste of wires. Cable, he felt, could become a competing broadcast-
ing network, not simply the supplicant to television broadcasters. So Turner
bought access to a satellite and started broadcasting content across the satel-
lite to cable stations everywhere. Cable thus became a content provider as
well as a conduit for other people's content.[10-10]

By the early 1990s, cable was the dominant mode of accessing television

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