1 Confronting Market Failure Past lessons toward public policy interventions Victor Pickard Published in Lew Friedland and Mark Lloyd (Eds.), The Communications Crisis in America (and how to fix it). New York: Palgrave, 127-142. Introduction In the early decades of the twenty-first century, old problems afflict new media. 1 Once again, America anguishes over the diminished democratic promise of a new medium. Like broadcasting in the 1940s, digital communications have become dominated by oligopolies driven by a corporate libertarian logic that is antagonistic toward public-interest principles. These ownership structures contribute to various shortcomings with American broadband, including disparities among communities and socioeconomic groups in terms of speeds and access, higher costs for service, and impediments to free-flowing information and content. Just as radio’s full democratic potential was thwarted by commercial capture in the 1930s and ’40s, a similar fate faces the Internet today. This crisis in digital media coincides with a structural crisis in journalism as the newspaper industry continues its irreparable decline. Earlier media policy debates are instructive to policymakers as they confront these crises. Although ultimately unsuccessful, policy battles in the 1940s that defined the social contract between media institutions, publics, and the regulatory state attempted to buffer media’s public service mission from undue market pressures. Nearly all of them were resolved in ways that aligned with a “corporate libertarian” logic that benefited commercial broadcasters and publishers over the public (see Pickard 2013). This “postwar settlement for American media” enshrined self-regulation, a “negative” First Amendment, and industry-defined social 1 This chapter draws from the conclusion of Pickard 2015.