Media laws in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are routinely criticized for serving as legal tools for subduing dissent (Duffy 2014). Ownership regulations as part of media law are also frequently considered in this light. Globally, the central issues in media ownership regulations are foreign ownership of media and regulations against cross-media ownership and concentration. On these issues media laws in the GCC take different stands: they contain provisions for restricting ownership of media outlets to citizens, while they fail to provide any provisions for cross-media ownership or concentration. The paper seeks to explain this phenomenon through a legal anthropological reading of GCC media laws. Moving beyond dichotomies of freedom versus suppression, it starts from the premise that law is a realm in which societies envision themselves and people’s connections to one another. Law both constitutes culture – understood as ideas, practices, and social relations – and is itself constituted by culture (Rosen 2006). Understanding media laws in the GCC is thus inseparable from understanding GCC cultures and societies. Based on publicly available information and background interviews with policymakers and experts, the paper explores how the ownership provisions of media laws are interpreted within GCC countries. GCC countries share a range of cultural features, including the understanding of the self in terms of the web of connections one builds with others based on mutual obligations. Nor do crosscutting ties in the community show signs of decrease over time, regardless of how extensively ‘modernity’ has transformed the public face of these societies since independence. Every facet of society, including the law, remains intensely personalized: knowing a person’s background and past associations, that is knowing how he forms ties to others, is vital information. Seen through this lens, legal restrictions on foreign ownership of media are logical measures, for it is impossible to gauge the background of aliens, or to establish ties with multinational media firms that are usually public limited companies. The dense personal ties underpinning GCC societies also explain why concentration of ownership has not been an issue in GCC media. Private media owners maintain an informal balance across the market that prevents any one group from dominating the media scene through aggressive expansion. Local practices, rather than laws and regulations, continue to ensure the plurality of media ownership.