Yahoo! RIAA deal was designed to stifle competition Mark Cuban, who sold broadcast.com to Yahoo!, has stated in writing that the deal Yahoo! signed with the RIAA was designed to exclude small webcasters from the market. Such a contract would not be feasible if the RIAA was not a cartel, so let's hope for toothy anti-trust investigation soon. It also puts the Library of Congress in the embarrassing position of giving an anti-competitive royalty regimen a government mandate in CARP, and if people raise enough of a stink I can see that decision being repealed.

As it stands, the RIAA has the worst of both worlds: they aren't charging big webcasters enough and have embarrassed the government by tricking them into shutting small webcasters down. I'll be interested to see where this story goes from here.