Mozelle W. Thompson's Keynote Address

Good evening everyone and welcome to this annual event for the Media Access Project. I am happy to see all of you here. Looking out at the audience, I see some familiar faces and some new ones. While I know that my old friends are here because there is free food & drink, I hope all of you are or will be friends of the Media Access Project.

Most of you know, I recently finished a seven-year term at the Federal Trade Commission, enforcing Federal antitrust and consumer protection laws. During that time, I witnessed the unprecedented consolidation and convergence of media, technology and content distribution companies. What I learned was that consumers benefit from free and competitive markets. They get the best goods & services at lowest prices. I also learned that when artificial barriers are erected, (economic, legal or technological) consumers lose because they don’t know that they could have gotten better and cheaper products or they’ve been deprived of innovation.

It takes critical thinkers and decisive actors to ensure that barriers are cleared and consumers win. Moreover, the job of clearing these barriers becomes even more important where the relevant marketplace is the market for ideas since the free flow of information and opinion lies at the root of American democracy. It is the market for ideas that has historically fueled our innovation, fed our economic mobility, and fostered democratic choice. However, artificial barriers can not only deprive the public of access to ideas, it can have a chilling effect on the very generation of them.

Today, rapid changes in technology and convergence of media industries have brought forth new challenges to how we define markets- including the market for ideas- and how we bring down barriers. These challenges continue to grow larger and faster. For example, how many of you have talked about the "new media"? (and I am not talking Katie Couric’s move to CBS.) I am talking about new sources of content, like streaming media, blogs, podcasts, and phone calls, being delivered by your I-pod, your PDA, your cell phone, your computer, and brought to you by Google, Yahoo and eBay. How these new businesses create, gather and distribute content raises important questions about who can participate in the "idea marketplace" and how.

I suppose that is why MAP is here and why it is so important. At this time when we are seeing such fundamental changes in the information marketplace, it is important to have critical thinkers like MAP working to shine a light on some of the same fundamental issues it has historically examined.

• what information do we get?
• how do we get it? and
• who gets to see and hear it?

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