The FCC upcoming draft broadcast ownership quadrennial review order is expected to resurrect the commission’s vacated joint sales agreement rules and stick close to a 2014 Further NPRM on media ownership, said attorneys on both the broadcaster and public interest sides of the issues. They said in interviews this and last week that there may be some fluidity on the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule that was specifically targeted in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals majority opinion that spurred the FCC to action. The item, planned to go on circulation by June 30 (see 1605250073), is expected to contain few surprises, several attorneys told us. The FCC declined to comment Tuesday.
Media General and Nexstar announced agreements to divest 12 stations, to secure FCC Media Bureau approval for their combination. Bigger questions loom about the deal's joint sales agreements, according to FCC filings and attorneys familiar with the deal. The FCC stance on JSA's is up in the air because of 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Prometheus III decision (see 1605250016) remanding the rules barring JSAs in some circumstances and the upcoming quadrennial review rulemaking which the 3rd Circuit wants the agency to finish soon. Even before the ruling, Nexstar and Media General argued in FCC filings that the JSAs involved in that acquisition should be allowed to continue, despite recent bureau policy. “To the extent that the Commission may have unofficially taken a contrary position, that position is inconsistent with the statutory language, conflicts with the Commission’s own precedent and practices, and even if correct, would still mandate grandfathering the Legacy JSAs here,” said Nexstar and Media General in opposition comments filed in response to petitions to deny the first company's buy of the second.
AT&T, Cablevision and Comcast are violating consumer privacy through their “opt-out” data collection, said Public Knowledge and several other public interest groups in complaints filed with the FCC and FTC Thursday. Despite federal law and FCC regulations that emphasize “the importance of giving consumers control over how their information is being used,” pay-TV carriers have “continued to use large amounts of their customers’ data without properly obtaining customer consent or informing subscribers of the extent of the use of their information,” said the complaints filed by PK, the Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Watchdog, Consumer Federation of America and The Utility Reform Network. “There isn't anything worse that can happen to a person's data than what the cable industry is doing with it right now,” said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld in an interview. AT&T disagreed.
The FCC will move to a new location if the General Services Administration wins a claim brought against it by the commission's current landlord, said a motion filed in the case by Trammell Crow, a Washington, D.C., real estate development company. Trammell Crow received a letter from the GSA naming it the "apparent successful offeror" to be the FCC's new landlord, but the lease won't be awarded until the bid protest by current FCC landlord Republic Properties is resolved, said Trammell Crow in a motion to intervene in the Republic Properties case filed in U.S. Federal Claims Court. If Trammell Crow wins the lease, the FCC would move to Trammell Crow's Sentinel Square development north of Union Station, reported the Washington Business Journal. The commission's lease at the Portals will expire in October 2017.
The FCC study of Hispanic TV station ownership was generally condemned by public interest groups and got no broadcaster reaction, in filings in docket 14-50 Thursday and Friday. NAB didn't file comments on the study. Public interest groups including the Benton Foundation, Common Cause, Communications Workers of America, Prometheus Radio Project and United Church of Christ filed joint comments that were highly critical. Public Knowledge and Common Cause jointly filed comments denouncing media consolidation. “The Study, while a useful contribution, does not materially advance the task of providing an evidentiary base for evaluating the Commission’s ownership policies,” said the joint filing from UCC and others. The Media Bureau didn't comment.
The FCC is trying to find a way to make its set-top box proposal more palatable to programmers, but they may not be taking the bait, said attorneys on the programming and pay-TV side in interviews this week. The FCC initially wasn’t expecting the amount of pushback against the set-top proposal from content creators, several industry officials told us. Now, supporters of the set-top plan and the commission are looking for ways to assuage the programmer concerns, attorneys and industry officials told us. It’s unlikely the commission can create a set-top plan that will appease programmers and also accomplish the FCC’s goal of making pay-TV content available on third-party boxes, a content company executive said.
The first round of the incentive auction appeared to proceed smoothly Tuesday, said broadcasters, broadcast attorneys, analysts and the FCC's own public auction dashboard. Anti-collusion rules are keeping participants tight-lipped about the proceeding. But by all accounts, the agency's system appeared to work as planned, industry officials told us.
Broadcasters' transition to a new TV standard shouldn't obligate multichannel video programming distributors to make the same transition, said the American Cable Association, AT&T, Dish Network and NCTA in FCC comments posted Thursday and Friday in docket 16-142 on the joint ATSC 3.0 petition from the AWARN Alliance, CTA and NAB (see 1604130065). All full-power broadcast commenters vociferously supported the petition. But pay TV, consumer groups and low-power TV interests said the petition doesn’t take their concerns fully into account, while Dolby Labs hailed ATSC 3.0 for bringing "significant advances" in broadcast audio and video performance (see 1605270024).
The FCC unanimously approved launching a rulemaking on proposals to eliminate rules requiring broadcasters to keep physical copies of customer correspondence on hand to be examined by the public and a requirement that cable operators allow public inspection of the location of their control centers. The proposal received no pushback from industry or FCC commissioners, as expected (see 1605060064). “The proposed elimination of these rules will reduce regulatory burdens on commercial broadcasters and cable operators without adversely affecting the general public,” the Media Bureau said in a news release. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler credited Commissioner Mike O’Rielly with suggesting the rule changes and leading on the issue. “Given the very few requests for onsite inspection of broadcasters’ correspondence files or cable companies’ headend information, along with modern options, like email and other social media, these rules look outdated and unnecessary,” O’Rielly said.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler could face an uphill battle trying to reestablish the joint sales agreement attribution rule vacated by the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in a majority opinion by Judge Thomas Ambro, broadcast attorneys told us. Along with vacating the JSA rule as expected (see 1604190041) in Wednesday’s Prometheus III decision, the 3rd Circuit took the commission to task for delaying the 2010 and 2014 quadrennial reviews and not abiding by the court’s decision in the previous two Prometheus cases (see 1605250016). That was the subject of a Communications Daily Bulletin.