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Hey COMM122 podcast listeners, this is Max, Your lovely podcast host.  In the previous episode, we discussed four historical regulations targeting the media and communication industry. In the episode today, we are gonna look at some of the most contemporary issues of media regulations. More specifically, we will bring up the issues of net neutrality and cross-ownership. How regulators deal with the issues reflect their regulatory philosophy and ideological leaning. With the seismic changes in the nation’s politics, we will see how the same media regulation issue might be dealt with very differently under vastly different administrations.Because most often regulations are implemented by the government and official regulatory bodies, let’s first discuss the role of government. In the previous examples of radio act of 1912 and 1927, as well as in the communications act 1934, the US government served as a rule-maker, seeking to strike a balance between incentivizing the marketplace and to protect the public interest. Some would argue that the industry itself can handle issues pretty well. The industry can tackle issues such as media violence internally, by implementing self-regulation. People who support this view tend to believe in the free market and small government, claiming that the intervention of the government will obscure the supply and demand equilibrium. In other words, through free competition and supply and demand, the market forces, not the government, will pick the winners and losers. There is a lot to like about this viewpoint. However, the market force isn’t perfect. Sometimes industry just cannot regulate itself. Remember the interference issue before the Radio Act 1912? Governments need to step in sometimes because a democratically elected government can represent the public interest and neutral arbitrator. Many argue that the government should take a more preemptive role in making rules and setting standards to fix issues facing the media industry, not only because market force may fail, but also because the media and communication industry is an important public infrastructure and the stake for the public interest is high. Many media products resemble public goods or common pools of resources, and they cannot be entirely privatized. While this call for governments to step in preemptively might be well-intended, sometimes governments may become too intrusive, paternalistic, or even ignorant by making rules too cumbersome or irrelevant that it takes toll on the healthy development of the industry. We can just look at the recent congressional hearings regarding online privacy, big tech, and foreign interferences. As some of the technologically challenged congressmen and congresswomen grill tech executives and engage in grandstanding, do you really trust they can make fair and balanced rules? So, this is a dilemma facing media regulations, government can be powerful enough to protect you from big business, but it can also be too powerful to harm you. Private industry can be powerful enough to deliver to you better goods and services, but it could become too big to harm the public interest.Next, we will look at a type of regulation called structural regulation. It includes setting rules and standards about access, that is, who has access and how, about ownership, that is, who owns and how much, and about licensing, which is the permission to use public resources such as public airwaves. Net neutrality, a recent regulatory issue falling under the category of access because it is about what content is accessible and by whom. The principle of net neutrality maintains that internet service providers cannot charge content providers to speed up the delivery of their goods. all Internet traffic, whether it be streaming videos from Netflix or your text messages, is treated equally. In 2015, under the Obama administration, internet service providers, ISP, were reclassified by the FCC as a c