Comcast’s proposed $45 billion Time Warner Cable buy is expected to face opposition from smaller cable companies, consumer interest groups and Internet content companies, some media professionals said in interviews. Such opposition is likely to result in conditions placed on the deal if it is approved, rather than a rejection from the FCC and whichever antitrust agency reviews it, the Justice Department or FTC, they said. DirecTV CEO Michael White and Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen have said they're worried about the proposed deal (CD Feb 24 p9).

The FCC Media Bureau requested financial information from Sinclair about its relationship to the companies with which it will have sharing arrangements as part of its proposed purchase of Allbritton’s TV stations, said a filing by Sinclair Tuesday (http://bit.ly/MZrO5A). Though the financial details are redacted under a pair of protective orders issued by the bureau Friday (CD Feb 24 p23), the submission includes financial results going back to 2010 for stations involved in the transaction, the details of performance bonuses paid to Sinclair by companies with which it has sharing arrangements and information about Sinclair’s guarantees of bank debts for those companies.

The Songwriter Equity Act (SEA) was announced without the support of Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., at a news conference Tuesday. Jeffries withdrew his co-sponsorship at the “11th hour,” said his spokeswoman. Jeffries was slated to attend the briefng along with the SEA’s sponsor, Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., said a Monday news release (CD Feb 25 p10). “We didn’t feel comfortable moving forward without the music creator community being united behind it,” said Jeffries’ spokeswoman, though she didn’t say whose support was missing. Section 2 of the bill, on “savings clauses for sound recordings,” which would keep sound recording royalty rates from being “negatively impacted” by SEA, was the linchpin that led to Jeffries’ withdrawal, said the spokeswoman. Higher sound recording royalties, compared to those of songwriters and music publishers, is what the SEA attempts to balance

CTIA supported arguments by the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) that the FCC’s revised Telephone Consumer Protection Act rules should not apply to isolated, immediate, one-time responses to consumer-initiated requests for text offers. In January, the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau sought comment on a RILA petition for declaratory ruling (http://bit.ly/1jxGq7v).

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s office appears poised to circulate Wednesday a proposed rule change on how joint sales agreements will be used to calculate TV station ownership, said agency officials Monday. They had said the item may be planned for a vote at the March meeting (CD Feb 12 p1), which would make Wednesday the “white-copy” deadline to circulate the item among the commissioners before it shows up on the commission’s agenda. The draft item will include a proposal to make stations that have 15 percent or more of their ad sales handled by another station attributable as being same-owned, and include a grandfathering provision similar to the one used for radio, under which stations would have two years to come into compliance with the rule, FCC officials have said. Last week, the Justice Department asked the FCC to require JSA attribution (CD Feb 24 p7).

The paid peering deal between Comcast and Netflix, which would have the online video distributor collocating close to the cable ISP’s facilities to speed delivery, has drawn criticism from public interest groups. It’s just one more step toward a future in which companies that can afford to pay get better treatment, on a medium that should be treated like any other utility, they say. Free-market proponents say the deal is driven by simple laws of supply and demand: Netflix takes up much of ISPs’ capacity, and it only makes sense it would pay more to defray the costs. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam told CNBC Monday his company had a similar deal with Netflix in the works. Paid peering deals have become increasingly common in recent years (CD July 1 p1).

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., long one of the top members of the House on communications policy, said Monday he won’t seek reelection. Dingell had been considered a candidate for top Democrat on the House Commerce Committee, a committee he long chaired when Democrats ran the House. “That time has come,” Dingell, 87, said Monday in his State of the District speech to the Southern Wayne County Regional Chamber of Commerce, according to prepared remarks (http://1.usa.gov/1eq1uHv). “I have ten months more in Congress, and I'm not going to waste a minute. There’s still a lot to be done and a lot I want to do.”

The FCC will work to fill some of the holes that the commission has yet to answer on the dynamics of the upcoming broadcast spectrum incentive auctions, said Chairman Tom Wheeler. “We live in revolutionary times and it’s requiring revolutionary thinking,” he said Monday in a video at an Association of Public Television Stations event in Washington. “Part of that revolution is spectrum and how the analog assumptions of yesterday don’t fit with the digital realities of today.” Never before has there been such a “risk-free and rewarding opportunity for people to participate in the digital revolution,” he said. Wheeler said the channel-sharing trial with Los Angeles TV stations KLCS and KJLA is “really important in demonstrating the realities of moving from analog concepts to digital reality.”

A Utah State Senate bill, which officials of a state broadband network said would kill a proposed deal with an Australian firm to help the financially troubled Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) continue, was amended (http://1.usa.gov/1mDnCbo) by the Business and Labor Committee Monday to allow the proposed public-partnership to remain viable. Reflecting uncertainty by state legislators about the viability of UTOPIA, which as of last year was $214.8 million in debt and losing money (CD Jan 24/13 p16), SenCommittee Chairman Curtis Bramble (R) said he joined other committee members in letting the amended SB-190 go forward “reluctantly."

A Comcast purchase of Time Warner Cable is unlikely to lead to a resurrection of the horizontal ownership cap limiting the portion of national subscribers a cable company can serve, and any FCC move to bring back such a cap is unlikely to affect the $45 billion deal, said analysts, cable attorneys and public interest groups in interviews. The FCC’s former cap was twice struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, but Comcast raised the issue again when it said the terms of the proposed Time Warner Cable deal would include a voluntary divestiture of 3 million subscribers to stay under the old cap’s 30 percent threshold (CD Feb 14 p3). A Comcast spokeswoman told us Friday that the divestiture is intended to “assuage concerns” about the size of the new company.