The FCC approved the 2006 biennial regulatory review, amending provisions of its rules pertaining to licensing and operation of satellite service radio stations. It includes two substantive amendments that eliminate requirements “to identify a radio service and station location in correspondence and codifying an established practice of allowing applicants to cross-reference, rather than re-submit, previously filed information regarding non-U.S.-licensed satellites,” the FCC said in a Federal Register notice to be published Wednesday (http://xrl.us/boezgs). Those two amendments require approval by the Office of Management and Budget, and the commission said it will publish a notice in the Federal Register when they become effective. The remaining amendments will be effective 30 days after the publication date of Wednesday’s notice, the commission said.
Notable CROSS rulings
A European Commission digital content initiative launched Monday could result in solutions to the most vexing copyright issues, Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier said. “Licenses for Europe” is a “structured dialogue” among all stakeholders on four issues: (1) Cross-border portability of services that offer online access to content. (2) Internet availability of European films. (3) Content which reuses other online content. (4) Tapping into the potential of new text- and data-mining activities. Licenses for Europe won’t be just a talking shop but a place where industry and consumers find fast, specific solutions, Barnier said. Contractual arrangements generally work faster than laws, but legislation can, where appropriate, answer certain problems, he said. Digital technology used to be viewed as a threat to content rather than an opportunity, said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes. That “wrong approach” led to “a lot of highly polarised debates,” but didn’t create any winners, her written comments said. The right approach is to adapt practices to fit new digital opportunities, she said. Music streaming services are increasingly popular and widespread, she said. There’s a “Spotify effect” in which music piracy is no longer an issue in Sweden because there’s a good legal alternative. And in France, digital is now the third largest revenue source for collecting society SACEM, she said. Technology and society are moving forward faster than the law and content licensing practices, she said. Content is needed for the digital economy, and the dialogue is intended to show that “technology and copyright can go together.” Kroes urged stakeholders to keep open minds and not to assume that new licensing mechanisms will resolve every issue. The solution could come from technology and data, along the lines of the global repertoire database, or something not even on the table yet, she said. Europe’s cultural and creative sectors account for up to 4.5 percent of EU GDP and employ more than eight million people, said Education and Culture Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou. Licenses for Europe is about “searching for pragmatic, ‘bottom-up’ and short-terms solutions” to urgent questions such as the rights and obligations of users, re-users and creators of digital content, she said. French citizens’ advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, however, accused the EC of an “outrageous attempt to avoid copyright reform.” Licenses for Europe won’t amount to broad reform of sharing and remixing rules, but will be a “parody of a debate,” it said. Three-quarters of the participants in the working group on “users” are industry-affiliated, and the themes and objectives are defined to ensure that industry has its way, it said. La Quadrature is registered to take part in the working group on user-generated content, but everything “in its name, theme and mission is biased to fit the views of the entertainment industry,” the group said. The EC has shown its contempt for citizens by framing the talks to benefit industry and not to reform copyright, it said.
FCC members and Media Bureau staff are considering seeking comment on waivers of media ownership rules for foreign investments in broadcast companies and for those who've overcome economic and other types of non-racial or gender disadvantages, agency and industry officials told us this week. They expressed varying degrees of hope whether incorporating such proposals into separate rulemaking proceedings might be part of a wider-ranging compromise among commissioners to resolve a deadlock. The officials said it will be hard to end a split (CD Jan 28 p7) between the two Republicans who support broadcast/daily newspaper cross ownership and the two regular Democratic members who don’t generally support such deregulation without first studying barriers to entry faced by minorities and women.
The National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters is no longer considering a compromise media ownership plan it made to the FCC earlier this month, the group said Wednesday. NABOB’s proposal (http://xrl.us/bocb4m) was for forthcoming rules to allow a company owning no more than two radio stations to also hold a daily newspaper in the same market, or one in smaller markets (CD Jan 28 p7). “Having given such consideration, however, NABOB has decided not to endorse it,” Executive Director Jim Winston reported (http://xrl.us/bodphh) telling Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on Tuesday. After speaking with more NABOB members than he had canvassed initially, Winston decided that the group could no longer offer to potentially support some deregulation of cross-ownership rules, Winston told us. The group’s stance remains that “there should be no relaxation of that, or any, broadcast ownership rules,” Winston wrote. The current version of the draft Media Bureau order would allow common ownership of radio stations and dailies in any market, and waivers for holding a daily and non-top four rated TV station in the same top-20 market, agency officials said. The Newspaper Association of America, meanwhile, continued seeking rules that allow cross ownership, saying of 1,300-plus U.S. dailies, about 25 are cross-owned with TV stations that were grandfathered because the arrangements preceded the ban. “These newspapers have received an extraordinary total of 30 Pulitzer Prizes during the time that they have been cross-owned,” NAA said (http://xrl.us/bodphd) in docket 09-182, where NABOB’s filing also was posted. “Many of these Pulitzer Prizes went to small and mid-sized cross-owned papers."
TV station joint sales agreements help enhance localism, diversity and competition, Bonten Media Group said in an ex parte FCC filing in docket 09-182 (http://xrl.us/bodeee). While the concerns that some have raised about JSAs and shared services agreements are speculative, “the benefits are quite concrete,” a Bonten attorney said about a meeting with Bonten CEO Randall Bongarten and staff from Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s office. These real-world benefits would be jeopardized “if such agreements were deemed to be attributable,” the filing said. Economies of scale in operating costs and in capital expenditures enabled Bonten “to support and to expand top-ranked local news operations and to hire more reporters and to invest in HD upgrades,” it said. In a separate ex parte filing in the same docket, Cox reiterated its interest in changing the FCC’s cross ownership rules (http://xrl.us/bodefj). Cox also supports moving from a contour-based approach to a modified designated market area-based and Arbitron Metro-based approach “for identifying newspaper-broadcast combinations that would be covered by any remaining rule,” it said Cox executives told staff from offices of all the commissioners.
State regulators came out swinging against AT&T’s proposal to eliminate legacy interconnection rules as the nation’s telecom infrastructure moves toward all-Internet Protocol services. AT&T represents its petition as promoting the interests of American consumers, but it’s really just “a transparent attempt to impose the business plan of a single corporation” on “the entire nation,” said the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates Monday (http://xrl.us/boc4os). Individual state commissions and associations supported NTCA’s petition, which they said would be a more tempered approach that retains some existing rules to protect consumers. In a blog post Monday, AT&T’s Bob Quinn urged the commission to let it do “trials” of deregulation in various wire centers so the FCC could “capture and address the operational, technical and policy issues that necessarily will arise” as the industry transitions away from time-division multiplexing (TDM) technology.
A partisan split among the four regular FCC members on media ownership rules (CD Jan 18 p1), which may be so intractable it can’t be resolved with the unanimity Chairman Julius Genachowski seeks, could be partly addressed by using a Minority Media and Telecommunications Council proposal as the basis for a compromise, commission officials said. They said some at the commission are considering parts of MMTC’s proposal last week as a potential pathway to a compromise on how much to deregulate ownership. A much bigger determinant in the outcome of draft rules first circulated Nov. 14 remains what revisions if any Genachowski makes to the Media Bureau order, agency and industry officials said.
Increased competition in pan-European business communications could boost Europe’s economy by nearly 775 billion euros (around $1 trillion) over 15 years, said a WIK-Consult study for the European Competitive Telecommunications Association (ECTA) and International Telecommunications User Group (INTUG) (http://bit.ly/VhOe4X). Since Europe’s telecom market was liberalized in the 1990s, “significant attention has been given to the impact of increased competition on the services and prices available to consumers” and small- to mid-sized companies, it said. But while only about 2 percent of companies in the EU could be described as multi-site or multinational corporations (MSC/MNC), they form a major part of the European economy, it said. Although MSC/MNC business communications make up a large part of the telecom market, policymakers and regulators generally assume that larger businesses are well-informed and exert significant buying power when they purchase communications services, it said. As a result, there are few reports on their experiences with such services, but several surveys suggest that competition in this area is less well-developed than expected. The WIK report surveyed 112 multi-site and multinational businesses whose operations cover all countries in the EU27. Key findings included that: (1) Large companies primarily want communications “services” such as the Internet and mobile services, rather than the technological elements that underpin them. They seek service reliability, bandwidth and technical resilience, among other things. (2) Business communications services (BCS) usually encompass a bundle of different products and services, ideally tailored to the needs of each company. (3) Businesses overall prefer using a single supplier that handles a range of services rather than separate suppliers for each site and/or service. (4) End-user choice of suppliers is often limited. (5) Businesses most often complained about being unable to buy fixed and mobile services from the same operator. (6) The complexity and tailored nature of business services mean switching providers can be pricey and problematic. The problem in Europe is that the fragmented retail market, where several players compete for different customers with different requirements across Europe, means it’s not possible to assess specific market shares in the provision of cross-border business communications, the report said. In the few cases where national regulators have examined their retail markets for business communications, incumbents’ market shares have been higher than expected, often greater than those shares are for provision of broadband services to consumers and smaller companies, it said. It appears that national incumbent telcos may also be strongly positioned to provide mobile services to businesses, it said. There’s also a mixed regulatory picture on key wholesale products used for BCS, it said. All this provides “compelling evidence” that a cross-border retail market may exist for provision of bespoke (tailored) communications to larger businesses, it said. The report recommended that EU and national policymakers rethink their approach to acknowledge the importance of having competitive markets for communications in the business sector via consistent treatment of wholesale access for BCS. Such changes can’t happen until the EU e-communication framework directive is next revised, but the European Commission could consider several interim solutions, it said. One could be to describe the retail market for tailored business communications to larger businesses and identify it as a cross-border market subject to prior competition regulation. A second option would be rules to address the short-term regulatory gap, akin to the mobile roaming regulation, which would need political consensus with the European Council and Parliament, the report said. A more harmonized market definition of BCS and conditions for business access would help meet the demands of large corporations, it said. ECTA and INTUG urged the EC to move quickly to create a single digital market for business.
The European Commission is preparing human rights guidelines for the information and communication technologies sector, said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes Monday in a lecture at Humboldt University in Berlin. Part of the EU plan to secure human rights online and offline includes allowing nongovernmental organizations to trial censorship-evading tools on Europe’s large-scale Internet testbed and mesh networks, she said. But sometimes those tools are used by repressive regimes instead of by activists, she said. Making human rights part of a telco’s corporate responsibility is common sense, Kroes said. An EU company supplying surveillance systems to a despotic government “is more than just an image problem, it is a major ethical problem,” Kroes said. The EC is working on human rights guidance for the ICT industry, she said.
Differences have emerged between the FCC commissioners that partly follow party lines about whether they'll likely approve deregulation of media ownership in an order that goes further than the Democrats want and falls short of what the Republicans sought, said agency and industry officials Thursday. They said that with Chairman Julius Genachowski in recent days seeking a vote on draft rules he first circulated Nov. 14 (CD Nov 15 p1), without changes to the 2010 quadrennial review draft, one or both other Democratic FCC members may vote no and one or both Republicans could approve with some concerns. Genachowski sought feedback this month on the draft rules, something he didn’t do much before the Media Bureau order circulated, agency officials said.