A new Communications Act would be a nice thing to...

A new Communications Act would be a nice thing to have, but “it’s going to be very difficult to achieve,” former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley told a Hudson Institute event in a wide-ranging discussion Tuesday (http://bit.ly/Xj9V2P). Smaller pieces of legislation are more likely, although a “big new statute” would “make sense for the country,” he said. Siloed regulations don’t make sense anymore, he said: Broadcasters are regulated as public trustees; telcos as common carriers; and multichannel video programming distributors, cable and satellite are somewhere in between. “As we see in the marketplace today, all of them are providing functionally equivalent digital services,” Wiley said. He supported proposals to eliminate cross-ownership restrictions that prevent broadcasters from owning newspapers in the same market. “It would be great to have the journalistic tradition -- more news and local affairs -- available to radio stations,” he said. “People have come out of the woodwork” to say that lax cross-ownership rules are “going to end Western civilization as we know it,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think it would be very good.” Wiley criticized commission plans to crack down on joint sales agreements in TV as the agency has in radio. A draft order would attribute such ownership to the TV station doing the brokering, when it brokers more than 15 percent of another station’s ads (CD Nov 15 p1). That attribution is unfortunate, Wiley said, because those agreements help bring news into smaller markets where stations otherwise don’t have the independent financial ability to provide the news. Wiley’s law firm, Wiley Rein, represents some media companies supportive (http://bit.ly/15t0663) of ending the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban (http://bit.ly/12J7Fpx). He lamented the “relatively low minority ownership of broadcast stations” in the country, pushing for “incubator programs” and tax deferment for minority ownership, that “could help minorities get started.” Wiley said the definition of MVPD -- and whether it applies to online providers -- is an important one that can’t be decided in a single complaint brought by Sky Angel. It’s such an important issue because so much programming is going to be delivered on the Internet, he said, pointing to Netflix outbidding the big networks for access to House of Cards. “It’s obvious there’s a new force out there,” Wiley said. “Over-the-top online programming and the carriage of programming is going to be increasingly important.”