Eshoo Seeks More Video Law Overhaul in Next Congress
House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., wants more aggressive overhaul of video laws next year, and is unhappy with what the four congressional committees of jurisdiction have produced for Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization. “The STELA bill is just the STELA bill,” Eshoo said Thursday at a Hudson Institute event. “It doesn’t contain anything earth-shattering.”
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Eshoo wishes the bill had included provisions truly overhauling retransmission consent rules, as she had tried to accomplish with her own legislation introduced last year, and expressed disappointment with what the House and Senate accomplished. Consumers are “being screwed” under the “racket” retrans rules, said Eshoo, who wants to become the House Commerce Committee’s top Democrat in the next Congress.
On Wednesday, the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously approved the Satellite Television Access and Viewer Rights Act (S-2799), which contained some limits on broadcaster sharing agreements and repeal the set-top box integration ban (CD Sept 18 p8). It will still have to be combined with the clean STELA reauthorization bill of Senate Judiciary Committee and then approved by the full Senate before going to a House-Senate conference committee to meld it with the approved House bill. STELA expires Dec. 31.
"There’s a shared commitment between the House and the Senate that this is something that needs to be done,” House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., told us of STELA reauthorization at the Capitol Thursday. “It seems to be like we're narrowing things now.”
But Eshoo emphasized the “long game,” as have Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and ranking member John Thune, R-S.D. The Senate lawmakers removed an ambitious broadcast a la carte proposal known as Local Choice from their reauthorization bill in recent weeks. Rockefeller and Thune had “warmed to the idea” of truly overhauling retrans, said Eshoo. Broadcasters have opposed those retrans overhauls and defended the retrans rules, backing a clean STELA reauthorization. “We have something to build on in the next Congress,” Eshoo said. “I'm not giving up.” She wants thorough hearings next year on retrans and all the accompanying video issues, she said: “Everything is not accomplished in one Congress. I have to be satisfied that we've raised the issue up.”
Walden plans on “working with Senator Rockefeller and Senator Thune to get this done,” he said of this year’s reauthorization. Walden is “aware of the general broad outlines” of the Senate Commerce Committee STAVRA bill but hasn’t “seen paper,” he said, citing the last-minute manager’s amendment that on Sept. 12 replaced and trimmed an earlier version. “There are issues we're going to be taking a look at [and see whether] we can get this resolved.”
Video law overhaul should be a part of any Communications Act update, Eshoo indicated at the Hudson Institute event. “We need to develop a road map,” Eshoo said of overhauling the Communications Act, as Walden and other House Republicans have said they want to do. “I think our video laws need to be reformed. … I have my ideas. I don’t know whether they'd be accepted or not.” Rewriting the act in the 1990s funded “scores of lobbyists” for years, who “raised their children” and built pools on that money, she added to illustrate the amount of time involved in the endeavor.
Eshoo is open to the idea of a Communications Act overhaul, despite emphasizing the magnitude of the endeavor, she told us later at the Capitol. “I don’t find it menacing at all.”
At the Hudson event, Eshoo repeated a recent call for the FCC to rely on the legal authority of Section 202 of the Communications Act Title II in writing new net neutrality rules. Broadband “would have to be reclassified, obviously,” Eshoo said, but the agency could avoid applying the “heavy-duty” regulation of other parts of Title II, involving rate regulation. “You know what I'm convinced of? That most people don’t read much anymore. There are 47 sections in Title II,” Eshoo said. “I don’t know how many people who have offered these heavy-handed descriptions, I don’t think they've read it."
Title II has, Eshoo acknowledged, caused a “firestorm,” as she recalled Republicans’ negative reactions to the idea in an oversight hearing with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler earlier this year. “This is the $64,000 question of what the FCC should do about net neutrality,” Eshoo said, lamenting what she considers time wasted and the need for rules to withstand court scrutiny. “We've been caught on the ropes for a long time. A decade has gone by.”