After several rounds of minor editing, FCC commissioners were set to approve a notice of proposed rulemaking for its 2010 Quadrennial media ownership review, industry and FCC sources said. No major changes had been made to the notice in recent weeks, as commissioners and their staff worked on its language, they said. Commissioners’ offices were finalizing their statements on proposed rules Wednesday as approval appeared imminent, FCC officials said. An FCC spokesman declined to comment.
Notable CROSS rulings
A protocol for standardizing rules for security interests in space assets such as satellites will go ahead despite industry concerns, International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (Unidroit) Deputy Secretary-General Martin Stanford told us Wednesday. Satellite operators, spacecraft manufacturers, launch service providers, insurance and financial companies and satellite and space-related associations said in a Dec. 9 letter to Stanford that the instrument is being foisted on them despite strong opposition. The current draft will introduce new and unneeded regulations for satellite financing and is inconsistent with market practices, more than 90 companies and trade groups said. Moreover, they said, it will deter potential investors and boost insurance premiums and transactional costs. But Unidroit intends to proceed because the protocol will benefit developing and emerging economies, Stanford told us.
"The EU needs to become not only Cloud-friendly, but Cloud-active to fully realise the benefits of Cloud computing,” a select industry group said in recommendations Wednesday to the European Commission. Four issues are critical to the technology’s success, it said: data privacy, governance and identity management; trust, security and certification; interoperability, data portability and reversibility; and innovation and uptake. The EC said the report signals a desire on industry’s part for a more coherent legal framework for cloud services. That lack of clarity was also highlighted by responses to an EC consultation on the cloud, it said in a Dec. 5 report.
EU governments should “encourage the principle of net neutrality” and ensure the open and neutral character of the Internet as their policy objective, the Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council of Ministers said in conclusions adopted Tuesday. Officials also agreed generally on many aspects of a European Commission proposal to drive data and voice roaming charges down, but many details remain to be settled, they said. The council also finalized its position on a five-year spectrum policy.
Free Press said it sent a petition with some 30,000 signatures to the FCC asking it to preserve media ownership rules such as the cross-ownership ban on newspaper and broadcast assets. The petition also asks the FCC to “address disparities in ownership by women and people of color and to strengthen its rule to prevent so-called covert consolidation,” Free Press said.
European businesses need simpler privacy rules, including a single data protection law, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said Tuesday at an EU data protection and privacy conference in Brussels. As part of her rethink of the data protection directive, Reding said she'll propose making companies subject to the data protection authority in the EU countries of their main establishment, she said. But this can’t be done at the expense of individuals, whose rights must be properly protected, she said. The new data protection measure, to be unveiled in January, will update the 1995 directive to new technological challenges, she said. It will include easier access to a person’s own data and better data portability so users can more simply transfer their data between providers, she said. Reding said she also wants the legislation to “establish the famous right to be forgotten.” In a world of increased connectivity and unlimited search and storage, if users no longer want their information stored and there’s no good reason to keep it, the data should be removed, she said. Solid rules are good for consumers but also benefit Internet companies by creating legal certainty that boosts user trust, she said. Data transfers are important not only in the commercial world but also for police and judicial cooperation, she said. Current law only sets standards when data are shifted between EU countries, not when they're treated inside a particular nation, she said. Data protection reform should contain the same rules for cross-border and domestic processing for law enforcement purposes in order to improve the free flow of data to fight crime, she said. The EU is doing its job but it also must count on others to take data protection seriously, Reding said. More companies are offering cloud computing services that stay in Europe and, while this is to be encouraged, it can’t be the only solution to protecting privacy, she said. Data must flow freely between the EU and U.S., and “it doesn’t make much sense for us to retreat from each other,” she said. Reding welcomed U.S. bipartisan efforts on data protection announced last year but said she has since learned that it only envisages voluntary codes of conduct based on multi-stakeholder consultation. “I hope I got it wrong -- because I am worried that US ’self-regulation’ will not be sufficient to achieve full interoperability between the EU and US,” she said in a written speech. Trans-Atlantic relations could also do with a better approach to law enforcement, she said. Europeans must be confident their rights are respected whenever their personal information is transmitted in Europe or to the U.S. for police purposes, she said. Reding said she hoped Europe’s reform of privacy regulation “can be an inspiration” for such changes in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Tribune updated the FCC on its court case to exit bankruptcy. The case in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware to emerge from Chapter 11 has “bearings on the applications that the Commission is processing under the above-referenced docket number” related to the company’s transfer of control, according to a filing posted Thursday in docket 10-104 (http://xrl.us/bmj3c2). The TV and radio broadcaster’s third amended reorganization plan “adopts the same approach described in the Exit Applications and the initial Tribune plan of reorganization to ensure that the stock ownership of Reorganized Tribune will comply with the Communications Act and the Commission’s rules and policies pertaining to ownership,” the company said. The plan “proposes no change in the requests for waiver of the Commission’s multiple ownership and cross-ownership rules as filed with the Exit Applications,” Tribune said. The court indicated that at a Dec. 13 hearing it “will consider the proposed time lines” to resolve remaining disputes in the bankruptcy case, the FCC filing said.
Don’t let multichannel video programming distributors use the FCC’s review of media ownership rules to “import retransmission consent issues” about MVPDs’ deals to carry TV stations, the NAB said. The association defended shared services agreements, which let separately owned TV stations in the same market share news and other services, against continued MVPD criticism of SSAs as letting broadcasters abuse retrans rules. “Recent filings by representatives of the MVPD industry were blatant attempts to use ownership rules to skew retransmission consent negotiations in their favor,” the NAB said. Cable, DBS and telco-TV companies had visited the eighth floor several times in recent weeks (CD Nov 22 p8) to try to get the quadrennial ownership review to further tackle the issue of SSAs.
The FCC shouldn’t revive a waiver process on common ownership of daily newspapers and radio or TV stations in the same large markets, a foe of broadcast/paper cross ownership wrote Chairman Julius Genachowski. “Free Press is concerned about recent press reports suggesting that you are currently circulating a draft notice of proposed rulemaking that seeks to recreate the Martin Rule, or something substantially similar,” Free Press CEO Craig Aaron wrote Monday: “The Martin Rule was bad policy when it was adopted in 2007. It has not improved with age.” A draft Media Bureau notice in the quadrennial ownership review proposes adopting a waiver process for the 20 largest markets that’s similar to one the FCC approved under then-Chairman Kevin Martin but which was remanded this year by an appeals court (CD Nov 9 p1). “Such action is not supported by any credible marketplace evidence or the agency record,” Aaron wrote of the possibility of reviving the waiver process (http://xrl.us/bmjp8c). “It is certainly not supported by the public.” A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
The extent TV stations can share newsrooms and other functions without being considered commonly owned is at play in the FCC’s media ownership review. Some at the FCC are considering whether to seek changes to a draft notice of proposed rulemaking on the quadrennial review that would probe further into shared services agreements, local marketing agreements and other deals that let separately owned stations in the same market share some operations. SSAs and LMAs aren’t attributable for ownership reasons, so two Big Four broadcast network affiliates can share operations without running afoul of local ownership limits. That’s all according to agency and industry officials.