The CEA endorsed the Media Bureau’s June rejection of NCTA’s Cabl...
The CEA endorsed the Media Bureau’s June rejection of NCTA’s CableCARD waiver request (CD Special Bulletin June 29 p1) and asked the FCC not to decide differently. In July, the NCTA asked the FCC to overturn the bureau’s dismissal…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
of its request to exempt all cable operators from the set-top box navigation and security integration ban. The bureau’s “arbitrary and capricious” move didn’t treat pay-TV providers alike, NCTA said. But the CEA said Friday in an FCC filing that in seeking commission review, the NCTA raised no legal issues that hadn’t been dealt with in its initial request. In its dismissal, the bureau acted correctly under section 629 of the Telecommunications Act, trying to get cable operators to create a retail market for set-tops “on an incremental basis,” the CEA said. “In almost every year since 1996, NCTA has argued that the Commission must apply its device competition rules” to every pay-TV provider “at once, or not at all,” the CEA said. “The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the Commission’s rejection of this argument,” it said, citing a 2006 ruling in Charter v. FCC. The group added: “Even if the Commission had some rule forbidding an incremental approach (and it does not), there is no evidence of any disparate impact on cable.”