The latest Clay Shirky piece on inequality and FCC regulation seems to be missing several points.

Sure, blogs demonstrate that freedom of media association leads to power law distributions. But the implication doesn't work the other way to imply all unequal distributions are therefore evidence of nothing but freedom of media association.

Unlike weblogs on the net, traditional media which have expensive requirements like wood pulp, printing presses, auctioned spectrum etc. are NOT examples of this pattern. They are first and foremost businesses, and primarily responding to the incentive of economies of scale, to pressure to consolidate. FCC regulations on media ownership are not there to stop particular media channels from making hugely popular programmes which win large shares of the audience. AFAIK there is no fine if you broadcast a show which gets 100%. So, they are not trying to preserve equality of audience. They are trying to preserve diversity of ownership in the belief that this guarantees diversity of content. (Why does diversity of ownership ensure diversity of content? Because without diversity of ownership, economies of scale always tempt these companies to try to use less content to attract more audience, narrowing the diversity.)

I'm also a bit concerned that Shirky is so convinced of his muddled analysis that he's resorted to scaremongering like this : can expect at least some members of the "diverse and equal" camp to advocate regulation of weblogs, on the grounds that the imbalance between Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit.com and J. Random Blogger is no different than the imbalance between Clear Channel and WFMU to criticise opponents of deregulation.