FCC Ownership Form Changes May Resolve Some Privacy Concerns
FCC staffers are changing a new media ownership form that has continued to draw criticism from broadcasters and others as violating investors’ privacy (CD Sept 22 p7), commission and industry officials said. They said Media Bureau officials seem to be working on a way to allow investors in radio and TV stations to complete Form 323 without having to provide Social Security numbers in a limited category of cases. The Social Security information is now needed to register for the commission’s online database used to collect the forms, they said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
A draft version of Form 323 is available from the FCC at www.fcc.gov/bureaus/mb/industry_analysis/form323.html, but owners of stations and their investors can’t complete the forms in the commission’s Consolidated Database System. That’s because bureau staffers seem to still be making changes in the form, several commission and industry officials said. Commission staffers are also grappling with how to waive requirements that each filer get an FCC registration number, for which a Social Security number must be provided, they said.
Case-by-case waivers of requirements for registration numbers seem the most likely outcome of staffers’ work, broadcast lawyers said. That would resolve some industry concerns but is seen by some as a short-term solution because most still would have to provide personal information, they said. Bureau staffers have indicated they hope to finish work by Friday, so the document can be completed and a Dec. 15 bureau deadline to file Form 323 won’t have to be extended, said commission and industry officials. A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment.
“They're going about it in my way of thinking in this totally backwards way where they're letting this December 15 deadline drive the entire process,” said broadcast attorney Harry Cole of Fletcher Heald. The law firm asked the commission to lift the deadline until there’s ample opportunity for comment on the form (CD Nov 18 p13). “I have no doubt they're working on” changes, he said of bureau staff. “But if this is such a hot issue,” the bureau should “put them out there for people to comment on,” Cole added.
If the District of Columbia and states request only the last four digits of Social Security numbers for voter registration, that should be good enough for the FCC, said Executive Director David Honig of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council. He wrote the commission late Wednesday asking it to not require the full numbers. “The commission’s requirement that they're trying to work through is objectively excessive,” Honig told us. “We certainly don’t want any issue to hold up the reinstitution of this data collection.”
That’s apparently a goal shared by bureau staffers. They seem loath to delay the Dec. 15 deadline, because it will take time to analyze data from the forms -- which must be current as of Nov. 1 -- for the 2010 media ownership review, commission and industry officials said. To get an FCC number that’s different from a Social Security or taxpayer ID number, the commission must collect one of those numbers on registration, a Q&A from the bureau said. “Form 323 does not collect Social Security Numbers or Taxpayer ID Numbers, and you should never list such numbers on your biennial ownership report.”