Tribune’s proposed sale of Newsday to Cablevision for $650 million is evidence that the FCC shouldn’t have given Tribune waivers of the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership rules, the United Church of Christ, Media Alliance and Charles Benton said in a supplement to their petition for reconsideration of Tribune’s transfer of control. “The fact that Newsday was sold at what appears to be a premium price provides further evidence of UCC and MA’s allegation that the grant of the transfer applications in this case was contrary to public interest, and the Commission should take it into account in its analysis of the pending Petition for Reconsideration,” they said.
Notable CROSS rulings
Bipartisan Senate rejection of FCC newspaper cross ownership rules won praise from Democratic Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps. Both said the Senate action (CD May 16 p4), a late Thursday voice vote, reflected the consensus opinion of the American people. Adelstein said the new rules “will likely face intense scrutiny” as a result. The Senate vote “represents a great victory of the people over the powerful,” he said.
An appeals court remand of FCC broadband over powerline rules could create regulatory uncertainty for utilities, possibly slowing the technology’s already anemic rollout, officials said. For state regulators, who are eyeing BPL as a way of making power utilities more efficient, the remand could be a “bump in the road,” said one official.
Kill the identical-support rule but don’t impose reverse auctions as a way to bring more equity into the high-cost universal service fund, 35 House members from both parties told FCC Chairman Kevin Martin in a Monday letter. Competitive local exchange carriers now get the same high- cost USF support as incumbent local exchange carriers, though their fixed costs may be lower, the letter said. “This policy has greatly contributed to the explosive growth of the USF,” it said. The FCC needs a cost recovery approach basing support for CETCs on their needs, not others’, it said. But implementing an agency proposal of the “untested mechanism” of reverse auctions would “stymie infrastructure build-out to the most rural areas,” the letter said. It would be better to pursue reforms “not at cross purposes with basic universal service policy,”, it said. Nor does it make sense to require rural carriers to provide service in high-cost rural areas while advancing proposals that “would pull the rug out from under their investments,” the letter said. The FCC approach could leave rural residents without adequate, affordable communications, it said.
The FCC should overturn a Media Bureau renewal of the licenses of four Media General TV stations in markets where the broadcaster owns daily newspapers (CD March 27 p16), said Free Press and the NAACP. In an application for review, they said Friday that the bureau inadequately considered requests by Free Press and others to block the renewals. That violated section 309 of the Communications Act, it said. The FCC also should reverse its grant to the stations of permanent waivers of the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule, the groups said. The licenses are for WJHL-TV Johnson City, Tenn., WBTW Florence, S.C., WRBL Columbus, Ga., and WMBB-TV Panama City, Fla.
A Senate resolution (SJ Res 28) disapproving an FCC media cross ownership rule is headed to the Senate floor under expedited rules, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., told reporters Thursday. Unanimously passed at a Senate Commerce Committee markup, the resolution has enough support to pass the Senate, but may not be able to survive a promised presidential veto, Dorgan said.
EU lawmakers this week unveiled counter-proposals to European Commission (EC) plans to revamp electronic communications regulations. Reports by the European Parliament’s Industry, Research and Energy and Internal Market and Consumer Protection committees enjoy strong support among MEPs, their authors said at a Wednesday press briefing. The most potentially contentious issue will be “where to find the budget,” French Socialist MEP Catherine Trautmann said. The EC welcomed the proposals, complaining they didn’t go far enough on spectrum management reform.
TORONTO -- For the first time in 15 years, the Canadian Radio-TV and Telecom Commission may streamline a maze of hundreds of Canadian pay TV rules for cable operators, satellite TV providers, broadcasters, and networks.
The Illinois Commerce Commission gave Level 3 Communications until May 9 to explain to the ICC staff why it hasn’t obeyed a 2007 order barring it from billing Neutral Tandem reciprocal compensation or any similar fee on intrastate traffic from third-parties that crossed Neutral Tandem’s network. The June order resolved a billing dispute between the companies over whether reciprocal compensation applied to transiting traffic. Level 3 had threatened to disconnect Neutral Tandem if reciprocal compensation wasn’t paid. The ICC said Neutral Tandem didn’t owe compensation on transiting traffic, ordered the companies to maintain their interconnection and barred Level 3 from billing reciprocal compensation charges or any similar fee on intrastate traffic not originated by Neutral Tandem. Level 3 appealed the ICC order to federal and state courts, where the matter is pending. The courts didn’t stay the ICC order. The ICC staff last month said Neutral Tandem complained that Level 3 still is billing its transiting traffic a fee similar to reciprocal compensation (Case 08-0621). The staff said Level 3 is billing a fee called “transport compensation” on transiting traffic and recommended that Level 3 be required to explain its actions, since they appear to violate the 2007 order. The ICC agreed and set the May 9 deadline for a Level 3 response. The ICC made clear that if Level 3 ignores this order to explain its conduct, or fails to give complete and specific answers to the staff’s questions, there will be penalties. Under ICC rules, Level 3 could be fined up to $1,000 a day if it fails to respond and other sanctions are possible.
Concern that Slingbox might violate FCC rules on program and market exclusivity prompted several “nastygrams” last year from NBC Universal General Counsel Rick Cotton, Hearst Corp. General Counsel Eve Burton told an audience of intellectual property attorneys at an American Bar Association event Friday. Hearst was an early investor in Sling Media, which allows customers to access their TV sets remotely via the Internet. Ultimately, the ad sales potential outweighed those concerns, she said. “In the end, Rick went back under The Rock and there was no clash between old and new media,” she said, referring to the 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters of NBC. Sling was since sold to EchoStar. The story was illustrative of the type of problems legal departments at large media companies encounter regularly, she said. Often, companies have units that may be working at cross purposes, Burton said, such as Hearst’s news organizations and its stake in ESPN. Hearst and other media companies have been battling the professional sports leagues, which want to restrict how news media are allowed to use the photo and video they shoot at games, she said. “[But] at ESPN, we pay an awful lot of money for rights and we would prefer others not to have access,” Burton said. “In the end… we don’t have a Hearst-wide policy so we're on both sides of the issue.”