It’s Time to End the Zombie Reign of Red Lion Broadcasting Article
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Recommended Citation
Catherine J. Cameron, It’s Time to End the Zombie Reign of Red Lion Broadcasting, 20 Ohio State Technology Law Journal 327 (2024)Clicking on the button will copy the full recommended citation.
The Internet is hunkered down in a ramshackle cabin, and the only walls protecting it from the zombie case that is Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969), are the walls constructed by section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. As a creature of legislation, those walls are flimsy and could crumble at any moment. And the Red Lion Broadcasting zombie is aggressive. The premises of the Red Lion Broadcasting case that the government should be allowed to regulate the broadcast spectrum to promote the public interest because the spectrum is "scarce" were proven wrong over forty years ago, but the case has been revived in zombie form and continues to lumber around the legal landscape seeking to infect new law. The only way to save the Internet and new technologies of the future from regulatory schemes based on strained notions of scarcity is for the Court to expressly overrule Red Lion Broadcasting and dispense with arguments that scarcity of any imagined kind warrants regulation of new media.