The American Cable Association is expected to be among participants at Thursday’s House Commerce Committee staff briefing on video marketplace issues, an industry official told us. The private event is part of the House Republican effort to overhaul the Communications Act and is open to Democratic and Republican staffers from the Communications Subcommittee. The committee has held two other such briefings -- one on wireline issues and another on wireless (WID Oct 7 p2). Industry officials had previously told us the speakers expected at the Thursday briefing are DirecTV, Dish, NAB and NCTA.
Creating net neutrality rules under Title II would require edge providers to make payments to ISPs for termination services, said George Ford, Phoenix Center chief economist, during a teleforum Wednesday. Reclassification, he said, would turn edge providers into ISP customers, which would require the broadband providers under Section 203 of the Communications Act to tariff termination service for Internet content. The FCC can’t forbear the tariff because the broadband providers are considered terminating monopolies, and competition is the basis for Section 10 forbearance, said Ford, who made the argument in a policy bulletin last month (http://bit.ly/WEvdLa). That the tariff requirement hasn’t been discussed in depth during the net neutrality debate “reveals the superficial nature of this debate,” Ford said during the forum. Tariffing has “significant compliance costs,” and neither carriers nor the agency is set up to handle tariffs, which have become less common, said Wiley Rein’s Thomas Navin, a former Wireline Bureau chief, during the forum. Title II proponents disagreed. The agency could forbear the tariffing requirement in Section 203, said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld, pointing to his Oct. 2 blog post (http://bit.ly/10K8cZV), because other statutes like Sections 201 and 202 allow the FCC to act in the case of “unjust reasonable rates and practices and otherwise protecting consumers.” Edge providers “are not in fact the customers of the end-user ISP. There is no service there,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood, and “there'd be a real danger in that view,” because “quite literally every website in the world becomes a customer of Comcast’s just because I view that site on my Comcast connection.”
House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., formally announced Wednesday that committee staffers are engaging in bipartisan briefings from industry stakeholders this month, as expected (WID Oct 2 p4) and initiated last week (WID Oct 7 p2). The briefings are part of Walden’s initiative to overhaul the Communications Act. “Although Congress may not be in session this month, our work continues full speed ahead,” Walden said in a blog post (http://1.usa.gov/1vWwcm5), referring to “recently commenced” briefings he termed listening sessions. The first session was last Thursday and at least two were scheduled for this week. “These meetings provide our bipartisan staffs an opportunity to dive deeper on specific topics and better understand the issues facing the modern communications marketplace,” Walden said. “We are interested in pursuing pro-innovation policies that reflect our evolving economy. It is important to have a firm grip on how our laws impact consumers, job creators, and the market as a whole, and hear directly what ideas are worth pursuing as well as identifying potential landmines to avoid.” The sessions are intended to “round out the information” that the committee has acquired from white paper responses and hearings, he said.
The American Cable Association further urged the FCC to close a loophole in its program access rules that denies nearly all small and medium-sized multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) from having the full legal protections and rights that Congress intended. ACA expressed these views in an ex parte filing Tuesday in dockets 12-68, 14-28 and 14-90 (http://bit.ly/1yNbRoX) in response to reports the FCC is considering whether to extend MVPD obligations to online video distributors (WID Oct 1 p8). Hundreds of small and mid-sized MVPDs that rely on the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) to negotiate their programming agreements are effectively left unprotected due to the FCC’s exclusion of NCTC as a “buying group,” ACA said. Before the commission spends time and resources expanding the scope of the program access rules in an unprecedented manner, “it should take action to ensure that entities Congress explicitly intended to use the rules are in fact able to do so,” it said. ACA reiterated that imposing the conditions from the Comcast/NBCUniversal deal onto the pending Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal isn’t enough because those conditions “had design flaws that left smaller MVPDs and their bargaining agents underprotected.” ACA also said the open Internet won’t be protected or promoted if the commission subjects only broadband ISPs to “no blocking” and “commercial reasonableness” rules while leaving edge providers free to block or discriminate in ways equally or more harmful to the openness.” The filing was on a discussion between ACA President Matthew Polka and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler at the Comptel meeting in Texas.
Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., praised the FCC for extending the comment period (WID Oct 6 p8) on Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. “By extending the comment period, the FCC clearly realizes that there are still voices that have legitimate concerns with the merger who still need to be heard,” Cardenas said in a statement Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/1rhgs8X). “Because this new entity will have such broad control over media production, distribution, cable and broadband, there is a natural chilling effect for many of those voices.” Comcast has shown “a disregard for those who air legitimate concerns and far too often resorts to accusations of extortion and name calling rather than addressing the concerns raised,” Cardenas said. “I personally have concerns with how smaller, independently-owned companies will be affected by the merger, particularly minority-owned networks already struggling in the current media environment.” Comcast has defended the proposed deal as positive for consumers and pushed back against the notion that the acquisition would hurt the health of the overall market. It made this case in a letter to Cardenas and other lawmakers in August.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study lends credence to the view that Netflix “allowed congestion to increase until it affected its performance” in order to “gain bargaining leverage” with Comcast, wrote Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology Executive Director Fred Campbell in an op-ed (http://bit.ly/1scg0xN) in the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman Wednesday. Campbell cited an MIT and Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis study (http://bit.ly/1oGQoJG) that said Netflix forced its traffic “through clogged delivery routes, when less congested channels were available.” Netflix was not immediately available for comment.
More than 99 percent of Comcast’s shareholders voted to support a proposed stock issuance in connection with the planned buy of Time Warner Cable, Comcast said in a news release Wednesday (http://bit.ly/1qj5xeF). Comcast will issue 2.875 shares of Comcast Class A common stock for every one share of Time Warner Cable common stock, the release said. TWC shareholders will vote on the merger Thursday, the release said.
Time Warner Cable said all of its customers in the Austin metropolitan area have access to its gigabit TWC Maxx service following months of network upgrades. TWC said it’s also continuing upgrades in New York and Los Angeles, the two other current target cities for the TWC Maxx services. An additional seven markets are set to launch in 2015, TWC said. The TWC Maxx also includes a larger on-demand library, all-digital lineup and a more advanced set-top box, the company said Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1s7BITG).
Dish Network and Frontier Communications renewed a multiyear contract that gives the telco’s customers bundled technology solutions. The bundled offerings pair Frontier broadband and voice services with a suite of Dish products and services, said the DBS company in Tuesday in a news release (http://bit.ly/1saQmKi). It said Frontier is a single, local point of contact for service and billing.
Twitter filed a lawsuit against the FBI and the Justice Department asking the court to allow the social media company to release the “actual scope of surveillance of Twitter users by the U.S. government,” said a company blog post Tuesday (http://bit.ly/Zc3Mtm). The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco (http://bit.ly/ZcfvIq). “It’s our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance -- including what types of legal process have not been received,” said Twitter. The DOJ and FBI wouldn’t allow Twitter to publish a redacted transparency report, it said. “Twitter is doing the right thing by challenging this tangled web of secrecy rules and gag orders,” said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director, in a blog post Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1oNScLW). “The Constitution doesn’t permit the government to impose so broad a prohibition on the publication of truthful speech about government conduct,” he said.