FCC Doesn't Have Authority To Control Placement of Caption Controls
The FCC doesn't have the authority from Congress to dictate where in user interfaces companies must place caption controls, said American Cable Association, AT&T and NCTA in reply comments filed in docket 12-108. Though consumer groups such as Telecommunications for…
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the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (TDI) have said the Television Decoder Circuitry Act (TDCA) gives the FCC the authority to do it, the industry replies argued that law is much too narrow to stretch that far. “Congress adopted the TDCA to address specific, technical barriers to the availability of closed captioning on television, namely, the decoding of captioning.” AT&T said. “Congress could have required in the CVAA [Communications and Video Accessibility Act] that closed captioning display settings be 'readily accessible,' but it did not,” AT&T said. “Congress’ charge to the Commission in the TDCA was narrow,” said NCTA. A joint filing from TDI and other consumer groups for the hearing impaired disagreed. TDCA was about removing technical barriers to captioning, just as the FCC proposal is, said the joint filing. Under the narrow industry interpretation, “manufacturers and MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors] could bury critical user settings as deep as they want in a complicated series of menus,” the joint filing said. “The Commission should not take such a constrained view.” The FCC shouldn't pass rules on caption-setting placement because they aren't needed, Echostar said. But if the commission does, it should give industry a two-year compliance period and be open to waiver applications, Echostar said.