Charter/TWC/BHN Broadband Committments Should Be Extended for 10 Years, PK Says
Charter Communications' broadband-related commitments should be extended to 10 years in any regulatory approval of its buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable, Public Knowledge said in an ex parte filing posted Tuesday in FCC docket 15-149. It recapped…
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a meeting between PK and FCC staff including Owen Kendler, who's heading the commission working team overseeing the deals' review. At the meeting, PK argued Charter's proposed broadband-related conditions aren't enough to protect the public interest, largely because their three-year span is too short. "If the purpose of such conditions is, among other things, to protect consumers by ensuring that online video has an opportunity to grow without being thwarted by cable incumbents, then any such conditions must be of a sufficient duration to allow new competition to develop," PK said. The group said it did applaud Charter's aversion to data caps, "were the commitment to be sufficiently extended." It also said it highlighted a number of public interest dangers it saw in Charter/TWC/BHN. Also armed with a litany of dangers, Stop Mega Cable Coalition members met with FCC staff to urge the agency "solve or prevent the harms" that would come with the $89.1 billion deals, said a separate ex parte filing Tuesday in the docket. Involved in the meetings were coalition representatives from Common Cause, Consumers Union, Demand Progress, Dish Network, Future of Music Coalition, Open Technology Institute, NTCA, Public Knowledge, USTelecom and Zoom Telephonics. They met with FCC staffers including front-line representatives of Chairman Tom Wheeler, and separately with members of the transaction team including Kendler and Media Bureau Director Bill Lake. The meetings were Friday, the day USTelecom announced it was leaving the coalition over a disagreement about the goal of stopping Charter/TWC/BHN, with USTelecom interested in it being approved with conditions (see 1602050056). According to the ex parte, coalition members said dangers of Charter/TWC/BHN include the potential of New Charter and Comcast acting as gatekeepers to the over-the-top market due to their high-speed broadband market share, the outsized leverage New Charter would have over small and independent programmers, and the increased power New Charter would have to block out competing modem manufacturers. In a statement, Charter said its "pro-broadband and online video friendly approach, which has won the support of industry leaders like Netflix, includes no data caps, no usage based billing, a commitment to an open internet and a generous interconnection policy." Charter also said it "continue[s] to engage with the FCC on their thorough review of the pending transactions.”