The FCC issued a request for quotations (http://xrl.us/bmra7g) on a study examining how Americans meet their information needs, how the media addresses those needs and what barriers exist to providing content and services to address those needs, a Monday public notice said. The commission is asking for an analysis of the existing research to determine the utility of existing data, the notice said. “It is first necessary to examine what prior research has been conducted,” the notice said. The FCC also asked for suggestions by Feb. 27 on additional studies it should commission.
Consolidated Communications agreed to buy SureWest for $341 million in cash and stock, the companies said. The deal gives Consolidated SureWest’s 130,000 residential subscribers and 15,700 commercial businesses in the greater Sacramento and Kansas City areas. The combined companies will have about 1,775 employees. The move came less than two weeks after an analyst said Google could buy SureWest to boost its fiber initiatives. Consolidated will pay $23 per SureWest share, or an equal amount of Consolidated common stock. The per-share price represented a 47 percent premium to SureWest’s Friday closing stock price. The deal is expected to save $25 million in operating cost and $5 million to $10 million in capital expenditure, the companies said. Consolidated expects to incur merger and integration costs, excluding closing costs, of around $20 million to $25 million over the first two years after closing.
NARUC’s telecom committee passed its resolution on VoIP outage reporting requirements at its winter meeting Monday. But the risk of VoIP service outages doesn’t justify the burden on VoIP providers to report outages to the FCC, industry officials said at a committee meeting Sunday. Meanwhile, the 1996 Telecom Act is “growing long in the tooth” and there would be heavy discussions about what comes next over the next year, said Michael Powell, head of the National Cable Telecom Association, during a general session Monday.
Sen. John Kerry worries about a one-sided negotiation over spectrum in the House-Senate conference working on the payroll tax cut extension, the Senate Communications Subcommittee chairman said Tuesday. The extension bill, due by month-end, is expected to include spectrum auction authorization to pay for the bill. While the House and Senate Commerce committees have developed individual spectrum bills, the conference has three members from the House Commerce Committee and zero from Senate Commerce. In a speech Tuesday at a New America Foundation event, Massachusetts Democrat Kerry said he’s particularly concerned with a provision in the House bill prohibiting the FCC from setting spectrum aside for unlicensed use.
Wi-Fi, including that available from cable operators, isn’t competitive yet with wireless carriers’ offerings, FCC Wireless Bureau Chief Rick Kaplan said Monday. Unlicensed broadband could yet pose a competitive threat, and shows there are ways to offload traffic onto other networks, he said at a Practising Law Institute seminar in New York. But the current state of the technology’s deployment in the U.S. means the frequencies it uses are not suitable to be included in the spectrum screen the FCC uses to review deals, Kaplan said.
The federal communications and copyright laws should be merged because the subjects are inseparable, a U.S. Copyright Office lawyer said Monday. The U.S. “needs to get rid of all the silos and reinvent the Communications Act,” said Ben Golant, the office’s assistant general counsel. The laws could be combined in a new title of the U.S. Code that also could cover consumer protection, privacy, cybersecurity and competition, he said at a webcast Practising Law Institute seminar in New York. “This is a dream and may never happen,” Golant conceded. It might be possible politically in 2025, he said.
The FCC’s net neutrality order has become “the hotel Sunday brunch of administrative procedure,” with the reconsideration petitions and rounds of court appeals, said Austin Schlick, FCC general counsel. Verizon offered a “very creative theory” that it could file an early challenge -- and it had to go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- because the order amounted to a licensing decision, he said Monday at a webcast Practising Law Institute seminar in New York. With the court’s dismissal of a filing by the carrier before the order was final, “the legal aphorism ‘Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered'” applies, Schlick said. But the punchline is that a court lottery held after timely appeals were filed in several circuits determined that “the case goes where Verizon wants it to go,” he said: the D.C. Circuit, which had ruled against the FCC on closely related issues in the Comcast case.
Industry participants are asking the FCC to revisit a couple of items in its recent order (CD Jan 12 p8) implementing a newer emergency alert service format that was developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some EAS players told us they want the commission to rethink its decision to prohibit the use of text-to-speech and to consider the burden the rule would place on the smallest cable operators. The Common Alerting Protocol is transmitted via the Internet, and the FCC’s rules address the equipment aspects of CAP.
The FCC should make Comcast widely and soon carry the Tennis Channel, the network said. It petitioned the commission to compel the cable operator’s compliance with a December recommendation by Chief FCC Administrative Law Judge Richard Sippel that the independent channel be carried as widely as Comcast-affiliated sports networks. Comcast wrongly “believes that it need not comply with the ruling -- and that the full burden of its ongoing and adjudicated discrimination must fall on Tennis Channel -- until Comcast has exhausted its appeal to the full Commission (and presumably through the federal courts),” the petition said. That “ignores” Section 616 of the Communications Act, which provides “that the ruling ’shall become effective upon release,'” the indie said. “Comcast Is Required To Provide Non-Discriminatory Carriage As Soon As Is Practicable,” said the start of a section on the remedies the Tennis Channel seeks. A Comcast spokeswoman said the company will make a formal response to the Tennis Channel next week. The defendant in Tennis Channel v. Comcast has asked to make an extra long response to Sippel’s decision, in a filing that will be made later this week (CD Jan 17 p11).
President Barack Obama received twice as many campaign contribution dollars from the Communications and Electronics sector as the entire field of GOP challengers in the 2012 election cycle so far. But among House incumbents, GOP members continued to receive more than Democratic members in political action committee contributions from the sector heading into 2012, showed data from the Center for Responsive Politics. The numbers are consistent with a trend of PACs favoring incumbents and the party in control (CD July 19 p1).