Another Gem from Clay Shirky
Shirky is one of the more subtle and thoughtful people publishing anywhere, and especially with his thinking about the application of IT to things in the world. His latest musing on the new US FCC ruling on media ownership is worth the read, and tells us a great deal more about the reality that the Internet is NOT a media environment.

Weblogs are the freest media the world has ever known. Within the universe of Internet users, the costs of setting up a weblog are minor, and perhaps more importantly, require no financial investment, only time, thus greatly weakening the "freedom of the press for those who can afford one" effect. Furthermore, there is no Weblog Central -- you do not need to incorporate your weblog, you do not need to register your weblog, you do not need to clear your posts with anyone. Weblogs are the best attempt we've seen to date of making freedom of speech and freedom of the press the same freedom, in Mike Godwin's famous phrase.

And in this free, decentralized, diverse, and popular medium we find astonishing inequality, inequality so extreme it makes the distribution of television ratings look positively egalitarian. In fact, a review of any of the weblog tracking initiatives such as Technorati or the Blogging ecosystem project shows thousand-fold imbalances between the most popular and average Weblogs. These inequalities often fall into what's known as a power law distribution, a curve where a tiny number of sites account for a majority of the in-bound links, while the vast majority of sites have a very small number of such links. (Although the correlation with links and traffic is not perfect, it is a strong proxy for audience size.)

The reasons for this are complex (I addressed some of them in Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality), but from the point of view of analyzing the FCC ruling, the lesson of weblog popularity is clear: inequality can arise in systems where users are free to make choices among a large set of options, even in the absence of central control or manipulation. Inequality is not a priori evidence of manipulation, in other words; it can also be a side effect of large systems governed by popular choice.

The telling paragraph however, is this one.

The third coherent position is advocacy of diverse and free media, which requires abandonment of equality as a goal. For this camp, the removal of regulation is desirable in and of itself, whatever the outcome. Given the evidence that diverse and free systems migrate to unequal distributions, the fact of inequality is a necessarily acceptable outcome to this group. However, in truly diverse systems, with millions of choices rather than hundreds, the imbalance between popular and average media outlets is tempered by the imbalance between the most popular outlets and the size of the system as a whole. As popular as Glenn Reynolds may be, InstaPundit is no Gunsmoke; no one weblog is going to reach 45% of the audience. In large diverse systems, freedom increases the inequality between outlets, but the overall size and growth weakens the effects of concentration.

And now we are testing that proposition in the Blogosphere, and it appears to be true. With trivial barriers to entry and the enablement of massive diversity, although massive inequality occurs, the distribution of the remaining "audience" among all the remaining channels guarantees that massive dominance in the sphere becomes all but impossible. The cynic in me says that there is exactly the reason that the big media people don't want a bar of it; that would ensure that there was no scarcity to parcel out and profit from and we haven't yet learned the economics of abundance.