Congress needs to provide “an on-going commitment to policies that ensure wireless providers have access to a significant and predictable supply of spectrum,” CTIA told House lawmakers in comments on the House Communications Subcommittee white paper issued as part of its Communications Act update process. Comments, which were due Friday, weren’t immediately released but a committee spokesman told us comments will likely be posted on the House Commerce Committee website in the same manner responses to its first white paper were earlier this year. CTIA and some others made their comments available to us.
Political group spending disclosure would vastly expand, often being posted on radio and TV station websites, under a new proposal from the FCC chairman and the general counsel during the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Targeting FCC and not Federal Election Commission rules, ex-FCC Chairman Newt Minow and then-General Counsel Henry Geller would have U.S. stations make such disclosure, by way of sponsorship identification. The proposal likely will be backed by nonprofit groups supporting such disclosure, and opposed by political advocacy groups and associations that don’t now have to share such information publicly, said those on all sides of the issue in interviews Tuesday.
Tech and telecom companies are donating freely to one Silicon Valley Democrat. The leadership political action committee of House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., raised $202,700 in the first quarter of 2014, according to a Tuesday filing at the Federal Election Commission (http://1.usa.gov/1paEAzi). Eshoo created the PAC, known as Peninsula, in February. Much of the money comes from tech and telecom donations, according to the 47-page FEC filing. Donations include $5,000 from Oracle President Safra Catz, $5,000 from Oracle Senior Vice President Kenneth Glueck, $5,000 from Oracle President Mark Hurd and another $5,000 from Oracle Chairman Jeffrey Henley, in addition to $5,000 from Oracle’s PAC; $1,000 from Twitter Vice President-Global Public Policy Colin Crowell, a former aide to then-House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey, D-Mass.; $250 from Facebook lobbyist Catlin O'Neill, a former chief of staff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; and $5,000 from NextNav CEO Gary Parsons. Political action committees of associations and companies also donated heavily: $1,000 from the American Cable Association PAC; $5,000 from the Cisco Systems E-PAC; $2,500 from the Comcast Corp. & NBC Universal Political Action Committee as well as $5,000 from NCTA’s PAC; two donations of $1,000 from the Computer and Communications Industry Association PAC; $5,000 from the Consumer Electronics Association PAC; $2,500 from the eBay Committee for Responsible Internet Commerce; $1,000 from the EchoStar and Dish Network PAC; $5,000 from the Google NetPAC; $5,000 from the Hewlett-Packard PAC; $5,000 from Intel’s PAC; $1,000 from Level 3 and Microsoft’s PAC; $1,000 from Sprint’s PAC; $2,500 from Time Warner Cable’s PAC; $5,000 from T-Mobile’s PAC; $2,000 from tw telecom’s PAC; $5,000 from Windstream’s PAC; $5,000 from XO Communications’ PAC; and $1,000 from Yahoo’s PAC. Eshoo’s PAC has already disbursed funds to several political campaigns, such as for the House primary campaigns of Reps. Tim Bishop of New York, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, and Suzan DelBene of Washington. Eshoo is vying for the top Democratic spot on the House Commerce Committee when it opens in November following the departure of ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif. She’s not the senior-most Democrat on House Commerce but has the backing of Pelosi.
The SEC should stop opposing updates to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, said think tanks and public interest groups in a Friday letter to the commission (http://bit.ly/1ewXrKZ). “Yes, the SEC -- the agency charged with regulating the securities industry -- has brought the ECPA update to a screeching halt,” said the American Civil Liberties Union in a Friday blog post about the letter, which also included the Americans for Tax Reform, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Heritage Foundation (http://bit.ly/1kRmZpL). The ACLU said the SEC does not want the law updated to require a warrant to access email older than 180 days, which is the law’s current cut-off. “The SEC is trying to frame the issue as a loss of authority, it is really a power grab -- one that would apply not just to the SEC but all federal and state agencies, including the [Internal Revenue Service], [Drug Enforcement Administration], and even state health boards,” said the ACLU. The SEC did not comment.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., lashed out twice last week against Comcast for its lobbying powers. He raised the issue at the Wednesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, where the cable giants launched a vigorous defense of why the deal would be good for consumers. Franken, the most vocal critic in Congress of the deal, also needled the cable giant on the issue in an episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators, slated to be telecast Saturday.
A major point of contention in any Telecom Act rewrite will be whether the kinds of rights that govern interconnection in the context of current sections 251 and 252 will apply to IP interconnection, stakeholders on all sides of the issue said in interviews. CLECs say those protections give them needed leverage as they negotiate against the big incumbents, and a regulatory backstop of state regulators when there’s an impasse. To ILECs and their supporters, grafting the legacy interconnection rules onto a new act would mean inefficiency and potentially onerous regulation in an IP world that is brimming with competition.
Two issues being hotly debated in state capitals and the FCC could land in Congress’ lap as part any Telecom Act update, said officials at associations for state and local governments and interest groups in recent interviews. Much will depend on FCC actions, but a commission move to preempt state laws that throw up obstacles to creating municipal broadband networks would run into the objection of state legislatures, particularly from those that have passed laws they see as protecting taxpayers from potential boondoggles, said Utah Senate President Pro-Tem Curt Bramble, a Republican.
Overhauling the Telecom Act may be timely but is fraught with serious, sometimes unpredictable implications and hard work, said those who succeeded in rewriting telecom law 18 years ago. House Republicans announced a plan to again update the act in December, with hearings and white papers this year and legislation on the table next year. Some of those responsible for the 1996 Act, the first and only rewrite since 1934, said in interviews an update is possible and emphasized the importance of strategic focus and constant collaboration, given the magnitude of the process.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency weighed in on an FCC public notice (CD March 13 p10) asking whether the commission should make broadcasters switch to a “designated hitter” system to send emergency alert system (EAS) messages in languages other than English when the foreign-language station is off-air. A one-paragraph FEMA comment posted Wednesday in docket 04-296, 26 days before initial responses are due to the Public Safety Bureau request (CD March 31 p15), backed the Minority Media and Telecommunication Council’s work to extend EAS warnings to those who don’t speak English. FEMA cautioned that using text-to-speech (TTS) technology to send such non-English warnings of bad weather, natural disasters and other events has “limitations.” A designated hitter approach would have stations in the same market of one that’s off-air distribute alerts in the language used by the knocked-out broadcaster.
Advocacy groups for broadcasters and cable sparred this week over cable buying groups, which broadcast organization TVFreedom.org called “a dubious pay-TV business practice,” in a release calling for congressional and regulatory investigations of the National Cable Television Cooperative. “We believe America’s consumers deserve to know whether buying groups, like NCTC, provide any savings at all to consumers on their monthly cable bills,” said a TVFreedom spokesman in the release. TVFreedom took particular aim at the American Cable Association, which has been lobbying the FCC for more program carriage protection for buying groups like NCTC. In responses from ACA and the American Television Alliance (ATVA), the cable industry said TVFreedom’s focus on joint negotiation with programmers through buying groups was a reaction to likely new FCC restrictions on broadcasters jointly negotiating retransmission consent contracts. Calling TVFreedom a “proxy” for the NAB, ACA called the allegations against NCTC “a desperate and pathetic effort to deflect attention away from the fact that TV stations have been caught red-handed by the Federal Communications Commission in colluding in the negotiation of retransmission consent.” NAB is a member of TVFreedom, along with many other broadcaster groups. ATVA also linked the attack on NCTC to NAB. “This baseless attack is further proof the NAB is so desperate to distract from the collusion crackdown it’s facing that it’s willing to make up a phony story,” said ATVA. In an emailed response, a TVFreedom spokesman said the groups were trying to cloud the issue. “We are asking the NCTC and ACA pay-TV members to simply answer the questions we are asking for the benefit of consumers’ awareness,” said the spokesman. In its own emailed release, NTCA said broadcasters were trying to “defect focus” and “impede” rule updates. Video buying groups are “indispensable” to small carriers that provide video services in rural areas, NTCA said. “Without video buying groups that often provide the only hope of managing content costs, small companies could not bring video to remote areas where over-the-air signals are often difficult or impossible to receive,” NTCA said.