Teeth are gnashing and swords are being drawn in response to the news that Comcast is snarfing down 51 percent of NBC Universal—the other 49 percent owned by General Electric—in a new joint venture. The deal will give Comcast, already the nation's biggest cable company and ISP, control over a huge swath of video content.

"This is the most important media merger since Lucy married Desi," declared Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project. "The merger clearly threatens to transform video markets nationwide. Although the details of the deal have not yet been announced, I am strongly concerned about the market power enjoyed by a Comcast/NBC combination. No one entity should have control over such a large audience."

The ensuing debate will push net neutrality questions "to the forefront," warned Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge. "Those who want to argue that AT&T, Verizon and, yes, Comcast, should be able to play favorites and have control over the content on the Internet will have an even larger barrier to surmount as the breadth, depth and economic might of the new media giant becomes apparent."

They will also have to contend with noisy public opposition to the proposed merger. "Free Press will be rallying people across the country who are tired of mega-mergers being rubber stamped," the organization promised on Tuesday. "We will make sure that this time their voices can’t be ignored."

If there's a ring of confidence in these declarations, it's because the Comcast/NBC deal faces a very different regulatory environment than any recent mergers, notably the Sirius/XM or AT&T/BellSouth approvals. One wonders whether either of these marriages would have gotten past a Federal Communications Commission with Democratic rather than Republican majorities—not to mention the scrutiny of the Justice Department, which will be weighing in on this latest question, too.

It's also uncertain how the FCC will evaluate the Comcast/NBC union. Most of the Commission's media ownership rules prohibit any entity from buying up too many radio stations, television stations, or newspapers in a single market. They also ban a company from owning two networks or too much national television audience share. The NBC/Comcast deal offers the possibility of a single enterprise dominating ISPs, cable delivery, and now video content throughout the United States. That's a scary prospect for more than a few observers, but it's not clear with what regulatory tools the FCC will evaluate this merger.

Still, crusading against mergers is something that the Stop Big Media crowd knows how to do. They've had lots of practice over the last decade, and that story has relevance for this controversy.

We will have rules

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 required the FCC to review its media ownership rules every two years, and to consider "whether any such rules are necessary in the public interest as a result of competition." And so in late 2001, Chair Michael Powell launched a dozen studies on the present media landscape, then opened a proceeding that pretty much declared all the restrictions up for grabs—even the dual-network rule, which prohibits radio and TV networks from merging with each other.

"Rebuilding the factual foundation of the Commission's media ownership regulations is one of my top priorities," Powell declared. "For too long, the Commission has made sweeping media policy decisions without a contemporaneous picture of the media market."

But by 2002, you didn't have to hire any experts to know that a new force had arrived on the media market: the read/write/webosphere, which saw itself as a challenger against not only the two-party system, but network broadcasting as well. While just about every major media entity avidly supported Powell's efforts to relax the FCC's broadcast ownership rules, Free Press and hundreds of regional and local groups rhetorically threw themselves across the rails of the process.

Urging them on were the FCC's two minority Commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein. While Powell consented to only one public hearing on the agency's rules, Copps and Adelstein appeared at dozens of unofficial events, to which thousands of people attended. Powell was unprepared for any of this. His public comments were obstinate, often taciturn. "[L]et me now tell you this," he declared in 2003. "We will have broadcast ownership rules at the end of this proceeding."

My religion

To almost everyone's surprise, however, conservatives started having second thoughts about the process. The National Rifle Association sent out a "Media Monopoly Alert" to its members, signed by NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre, urging them to oppose media concentration: "[Y]ou better believe that if these Big Media executives get the control they want over America's radio and TV airwaves, it will be all but impossible for your NRA to fight our grassroots battles in the way we have done so successfully in the past," he warned.

And William Safire of the New York Times urged caution as well: "Michael Powell, appointed by Bush to be FCC chairman, likes to say 'the market is my religion'," Safire wrote. "My conservative economic religion is founded on the rock of competition, which—since Teddy Roosevelt's day—has protected small business and consumers against predatory pricing leading to market monopolization... Republicans in the House, intimidated by the powerful broadcast lobby, don't admit that some regulation can be pro-business."

As even Powell's supporters later noted, by putting almost every one of the agency's rules on the regulatory table, Powell created a huge political target for opponents of consolidation to zero in on. When, by a vote of three to two, the agency finally relaxed many of the rules, the Senate quickly condemned the decision by a 15-member majority. And the decision itself, too big and complicated for its legal britches, was challenged by the Prometheus Radio Project in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 2004, the Third Circuit granted a motion to stay. The court argued that the FCC's new rules needed to be redone, observing that the FCC's analysis of media diversity at the time "gave too much weight to the Internet as a media outlet" and "irrationally assigned outlets of the same media type equal market shares." Six months later Michael Powell resigned as Chair of the FCC. President Bush named Powell's soft-spoken colleague Kevin Martin as the new chief.

Just one rule

Martin had voted for Powell's changes, but he understood that his former boss had tried to accomplish too much. "One of the things that I had advocated for, and I thought would have been much more helpful, was for the Commission to try to not say that we were going to take an action on all of these media ownership rules at once," he explained to us in an interview. "But rather, we should look at each rule individually."

The rule that Martin focused on was the restriction on an entity owning newspapers and television stations in the same market. In late 2007, he got a three-to-two majority to relax the rule in the top 20 Nielsen markets. The Senate quickly condemned the decision yet again, with Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) launching a bill to reverse the measure. Media reform groups quickly appealed the Order to the Third Circuit yet again, and also filed a Petition for Reconsideration against the move.

In November 2009, the new FCC asked the appeals court to hold all of the FCC's decisions in abeyance. Why? Because the Commission plans to launch yet another cycle of its media ownership rules in 2010. It's pointless, the Commission's general counsel noted, for the court to weigh in on these matters when the FCC plans to rethink them relatively soon in its impending 2010 Quadrennial Review (in 2004, Congress changed the two-year rule to every four years).

That would be just in time, in fact, for the public to weigh in on the Comcast/NBC Universal deal. As already noted, the Genachowski administration will soon come under tremendous pressure to stop or modify this deal. But the FCC is going to have to frame its response within the context of the media ownership debates of the last eight years. How it will accomplish that task remains to be seen.