The FCC should revisit Tennis Channel’s carriage complaint...
The FCC should revisit Tennis Channel’s carriage complaint against Comcast, using evidence already in the record that shows Comcast’s decision not to carry Tennis Channel on the same tier as the Comcast-owned Golf Channel was not in the cable company’s…
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financial interests, Tennis Channel argued in a comment filed Monday (http://bit.ly/1gLIXv3). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in Comcast’s favor in May (CD May 29 p1) because the FCC hadn’t based its arguments in support of Tennis Channel on evidence showing that carrying the channel on that tier would be in Comcast’s interest. That amounts to imposing a new test on the evidence, Tennis Channel said. However, applying new tests to evidence already in the record would violate “basic principles of administrative law,” Tennis Channel said. “The court’s mandate therefore must be read as having returned the case to the Commission to make the factual findings required by the court’s holding regarding the legal standards,” said the reply comments. Though Comcast argued in its own filing (CD March 20 p24) that the court did not explicitly remand the case back to the FCC, “there is no reason for the Commission to assume that it is foreclosed from exercising its normal responsibility when an appellate court vacates an order,” Tennis Channel said. The FCC should take up the case again, and set a new briefing cycle limited to the “narrow issues left unresolved by the court’s opinion."