Via Doc Searls, I just ran across this piece by Kevin Burton - I think he nails the issues that the media (and the RIAA/MPAA) have with the internet in general, and syndication in particular:

If the MSM was left to their own accord there would never be feeds. There would be forced registration, robots.txt which blocks everything, horrible invalid HTML, and content without any links. It's their version of DRM...

It's all about disintermediation. Before talk radio, all you got was the bland opinions of the "my word" (with a required countervailing piece) on the 11 pm news. They didn't like seeing talk radio explode the old set piece environment. Then the cable explosion happened, and instead of 3-10 channels, there were 30. Then 80. Finally, 500. Instead of limited bandwidth - which made some level of regulation easy to push - we now have more channels than we know what to do with. Where there's room for the "Golf Channel" and the "Food Network", there's certainly room for non-bland opinions. They really didn't like that.

Then, to cap things, the internet stumbled by. That's ended up being a live hand grenade inside the media monopoly. Even with lots of channels, you still need real money to broadcast. With the internet, all you need is a broadband connection and a free (or very cheap) hosting solution. Suddenly, everyone's opinion is available free of charge, with no means to regulate it.

They really, really don't like that. It means that the MSM has been disintermediated. We no longer have to visit the font of all wisdom at (insert major network here) to find out what to think - we can hook our browser or aggregator up to a nearly infinite number of news sources and do our own thinking. Our opinions can't be reliably handed to us anymore; the talking heads have to actually work up an argument.

The music and tv/movie business are going through the same thing. Sure, they whine about piracy, and they do worry about that. I don't think it's their biggest worry though. Consider the iTunes music store, for instance. Like Amazon before it, it's pushed the content producers aside as the biggest source of "what's cool" information. A very simple feature - the "people who bought X have also bought Y" thing - has the ability to sweep marketing campaigns aside. Instead of the content producers relying on their ownership of a pliant set of artists under nasty contracts (along with a few mega-stars who've moved past the control, and up to their own positions of influence), we have a system of user ratings.

That's a massive piece of disintermediation, and the powers that be really, really hate it. It's what Joel was on about in his piece on variable pricing in music and movies. None of this is really new. As technology moves forward, it empowers some existing players at the expense of others. The rise of air travel did in passenger rail; there's still a large body of rail regulation in place here in the US which is a vestige of the preceding power position. I think Kevin is spot on with this observation about how it's going to play out, too:

We're seeing now with MSM what's being mirrored in the Entertainment industry. They're being dragged onto the Internet kicking and screaming and they don't like it. Things are going to have to get worse before they get better.

It's like watching an exhausted toddler who's just been told it's bedtime.