The television and cable networks were once the dominant players in media. The television networks attracted viewing by virtually all of the U.S. population and dominated the entertainment trajectory of the nation as well as the political discourse, and those companies were owned by relatively few corporations. This hegemonic control of the primary voices called for the creation of several regulations to attempt to diversify the sources of content. Eventually the new technology of cable television began to grow and the cable networks joined the chorus of voices and provided new outlets for more marginalized voices. Each of these were technology-based and each had limitations on their abilities and performance, primarily on the numbers of channels of content that they could provide. The limitations of the technology led to a scarcity of means to accommodate the demand for distribution of content.This article picks up more than a dozen years after the release of Mosaic/Netscape and traces the fractionalization of the media, the world of an unlimited number of voices, the birth of a new technology, and the end of the networks. While many of the brand-names of the early television and cable voices are still available, their distribution technologies have adapted, their content has adapted, and their programming strategies have changed. Mobile distribution and the integration of the mobile phone networks have become important and the integration of content with internet distribution has been vital to those who survived. In addition to following the planning and adaptation of the media to new technologies of distribution, this article asl posits a new way viewing the information ecosystem as “neo-networking.” This article discusses the legal and business strategies used during an upheaval in technology.This paper is available at: https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/lawreview/vol2/iss1/9
