FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell said he backs Chairman Julius Genachowski’s remarks on the agency’s...

also testified Wednesday that the commission is monitoring the situation (CD May 17 p1). McDowell knows of no investigation by the agency, “but I may not know” if there’s one being done by career staff, he said Thursday. “We have an Enforcement Bureau that can investigate things on their own,” he said in a videotaped interview to be shown on C-SPAN’s The Communicators this weekend. Any inquiry “will follow the facts and the law and established commission precedent and procedure in this case, should it become a case,” which is true for any other matter, McDowell said. Media ownership laws need to be “updated,” he said as the commission continues its review of such rules that was due in 2010 under the Telecom Act. “We need to forget about these stovepipes” with different limits for various types of content, such as cable versus broadcast, he said. “We need to look at competition law and concentrations of market power and abuses of that power, and I think a new statutory construct should be based on that.” There’s “tremendous competition in video right now” overall, McDowell said. The last FCC report on that subject was completed in 2009 “in the waning days of the Kevin Martin chairmanship” and had data from 2006, he said of the study Congress required be done yearly. “We're way overdue,” McDowell said: “I think when Congress said one year, they meant an Earth year,” not a year on another planet.