Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., asked the FCC and Justice Department to...
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., asked the FCC and Justice Department to investigate Comcast for alleged anticompetitive conduct and violations of its merger agreements made in connection with buying control of NBCUniversal. His request came in a letter sent to the…
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agencies Monday (http://xrl.us/bm6i7y). Franken, a vocal critic of the deal and member of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said that complaints against Comcast’s compliance with the terms of the commission’s order have “languished” before the FCC “for extended periods of time.” Franken said he’s “disappointed” it took the FCC 10 months to issue an order to resolve a carriage dispute between Comcast and the Bloomberg financial news channel. Franken also alleged that Comcast was using delay tactics to prevent Project Concord, an online video distributor (OVD), from negotiating programming deals. He alleged Comcast was requiring Project Concord to provide a full, unredacted copy of the underlying peer agreement for content with another company before Comcast can provide its programming. Such a dispute has “far-reaching implications for the entire OVD market,” Franken said. He urged Justice and the FCC to act quickly to resolve the issue; otherwise “it will dissuade other OVDs from seeking Comcast’s programming under the terms of the order, and it will send a message to Comcast that it may set unreasonable requirements on OVDs as a condition of receiving its content.” Franken urged the agencies to probe Comcast’s announcement that it will exempt its VOD services for the Xbox 360 from its customers’ broadband data caps. The practice (CD May 7 p5) “raises serious questions about how Comcast will favor its own content and services to the detriment of its competitors,” Franken said. Comcast is “fully complying with (indeed exceeding) the transaction orders as detailed in our recently filed Annual Compliance Report,” a company spokeswoman said by email. The Xfinity app for the Xbox does not stream content over the open Internet and “is not subject to the FCC’s open Internet rules,” she said. Comcast’s Xfinity service is “indisputably part of our Title VI cable service which is not subject to the FCC’s Open Internet Rules,” she said. Franken acknowledged in his letter that Comcast’s video content is being delivered over its private Internet Protocol network, rather than the Internet, saying he was “not yet prepared” to call it a technical violation of the commission’s merger order.