Posts tagged as:

Skorup and Thierer paper on TV Regulation

by on May 5, 2014 · 5 comments

Adam and I recently published a Mercatus research paper titled Video Marketplace Regulation: A Primer on the History of Television Regulation And Current Legislative Proposals, now available on SSRN. I presented the paper at a Silicon Flatirons academic conference last week.

We wrote the paper for a policy audience and students who want succinct information and history about the complex world of television regulation. Television programming is delivered to consumers in several ways, including via cable, satellite, broadcast, IPTV (like Verizon FiOS), and, increasingly, over-the-top broadband services (like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video). Despite their obvious similarities–transmitting movies and shows to a screen–each distribution platform is regulated differently.

The television industry is in the news frequently because of problems exacerbated by the disparate regulatory treatment. The Time Warner Cable-CBS dispute last fall (and TWC’s ensuing loss of customers), the Aereo lawsuit, and the Comcast-TWC proposed merger were each caused at least indirectly by some of the ill-conceived and antiquated TV regulations we describe. Further, TV regulation is a “thicket of regulations,” as the Copyright Office has said, which benefits industry insiders at the expense of most everyone else.

We contend that overregulation of television resulted primarily because past FCCs, and Congress to a lesser extent, wanted to promote several social objectives through a nationwide system of local broadcasters:

1) Localism 2) Universal Service 3) Free (that is, ad-based) television; and 4) Competition

These objectives can’t be accomplished simultaneously without substantial regulatory mandates. Further, these social goals may even contradict each other in some respects.

For decades, public policies constrained TV competitors to accomplish those goals. We recommend instead a reliance on markets and consumer choice through comprehensive reform of television laws, including repeal of compulsory copyright laws, must-carry, retransmission consent, and media concentration rules.

At the very least, our historical review of TV regulations provides an illustrative case study of how regulations accumulate haphazardly over time, demand additional “correction,” and damage dynamic industries. Congress and the FCC focused on attaining particular competitive outcomes through industrial policy, unfortunately. Our paper provides support for market-based competition and regulations that put consumer choice at the forefront.

SHARE: 5 comments

New Progress in the 2014 Spectrum Auctions

by on November 26, 2013 · 1 comment

Both parties of Congress has been increasingly critical of federal agencies’ inefficient use of spectrum in the past few years and it seems like agencies are getting the message. The NTIA, which is the official manager of federal agency spectrum, released a letter yesterday announcing that the Department of Defense would be relocating some of its systems. Defense had reached an agreement with broadcasters that Defense systems will share spectrum in the Broadcast Auxiliary Service (BAS) band.

The soon-to-be vacated band held by Defense will eventually be auctioned off–hopefully in 2014–for billions of dollars and likely used for mobile broadband provided by wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. These carriers face serious congestion problems because of government-created scarcity of spectrum.

The carriers actually had targeted some of BAS spectrum because they weren’t convinced Defense would be willing to move their systems. The broadcaster deal reached with Defense means everyone’s apparently happy–the broadcasters can keep their BAS spectrum, the feds get new equipment and Congress off their back (temporarily), and the carriers get new spectrum for auction.

The deal is welcome news because the spectrum will be put to a higher-valued use once auctioned. The federal government pays almost nothing for its own spectrum and is a poor steward of the resource. Transferring spectrum from agencies to carriers means lower phone bills and more mobile broadband coverage. Government agencies are notoriously resistant to moving their systems or sharing with others, so entering into a sharing pact with the broadcasters indicates some of the resistance is thawing.

It’s not unequivocal good news, though.

The government is clearing out from a 25 MHz band of spectrum and occupying the larger, 85 MHz BAS band that will be shared with broadcasters. The military will need a larger band because sharing imposes some capacity constraints necessitating new, agile systems that search the airwaves to make sure they don’t interfere with existing broadcast users. Dynamic sharing like this only adds to the cost and complexity and may imperil next years’ planned auction.

Further, the BAS band is unavailable for auction only because of the antiquated command-and-control regime the FCC uses to award spectrum licenses. BAS is mostly used for electronic news gathering, which relays local and national newscasts from reporters on the scene to broadcast studios. Broadcasters have used BAS spectrum since the 1960s when it was allocated to them for free.

In a market, broadcasters likely would not have as much BAS spectrum as they currently have. In fact, because of technology changes and squeezed newsroom budgets, broadcasters are finding cheaper alternatives. Increasingly, journalists are using carriers’ LTE technology to transmit their breaking newscasts since the technology costs a fraction of the cost of news vans and equipment needed for BAS transmissions. That is to say, there are alternative business models in the absence of Soviet-style allocations.

So despite these industry changes, BAS spectrum cannot be auctioned for its highest-valued use (probably mobile broadband) under current FCC rules. Further, it will be even more difficult to bring the benefits of auctions to the airwaves if federal users are intermingling with existing users, broadcasters in this case. It’s a trend to be wary of. Let’s just hope that next year’s planned auctions occur on time so that more consumers can benefit from mobile broadband.

SHARE: 1 comment

CBS, Time Warner Cable & TV Blackouts: What Should Washington Do?

by on August 12, 2013 · 0 comments

over-the-topCBS and Time Warner Cable have been embroiled in a heated contractual battle over the past week that has resulted in viewers in some major markets losing access to CBS programming. When disputes like these go nuclear and signal blackouts occur, it is inevitable that some folks will call for policy interventions since nobody likes it when the content they love goes dark.

While some policy responses are warranted in this matter, policymakers should proceed with caution. Heated contractual negotiations are a normal part of any capitalist marketplace. We shouldn’t expect lawmakers to intervene to speed up negotiations or set content prices because that would disrupt the normal allocation of programming by placing a regulatory thumb too heavily on one side of the scale. This is why I am somewhat sympathetic to CBS in this fight. In an age when content creators struggle to protect their copyrighted content and get compensation for it, the last thing we need is government intervention that undermines the few distribution schemes that actually work well.

On the other hand, Time Warner Cable deserves sympathy here, too, since CBS currently enjoys some preexisting regulatory benefits. As I noted in this 2012 Forbes oped, “Toward a True Free Market in Television Programming,” many layers of red tape still encumber America’s video marketplace and prevent a truly free market in video programming from developing. The battle here revolves around the “retransmission consent” rules that were put in place as part of the Cable Act of 1992 and govern how video distributors carry signals from TV broadcasters, which includes CBS.

But those “retrans” rules are not the only part of the regulatory mess here. Continue reading →

SHARE: 0 comments

Isn’t “Do Not Track” Just a “Broadcast Flag” Mandate for Privacy?

by on February 20, 2011 · 3 comments

It seems peculiar to me that some of the same individuals and groups who so vociferously opposed a “broadcast flag” technological mandate in past years are now in a mad rush to have federal policymakers mandate a “Do Not Track” regulatory regime for privacy purposes. The broadcast flag debate, you will recall, centered around the wisdom of mandating a technological fix to the copyright arms race before digitized high-definition broadcast signals were effectively “Napster-ized.” At least that was the fear six or seven years ago. TV broadcasters and some content companies wanted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to recognize and enforce a string of code that would have been embedded in digital broadcast program signals such that mass redistribution of video programming could have been prevented.

Flash forward to the present debate about mandating a “Do Not Track” scheme to help protect privacy online. As I noted in my filing last week to the Federal Trade Commission, at root, Do Not Track is just another “information control regime.” Much like the broadcast flag proposal, it’s an attempt to use a technological quick-fix to solve a complex problem. When it comes to such information control efforts, however, there aren’t many good examples of simple fixes or silver-bullet solutions that have worked, at least not for very long. The debates over Wikileaks, online porn, Internet hate speech, and Spam all demonstrate how challenging it can be to put information back into the bottle once it is released into the digital wild.

To be clear, I am not opposed to technological solutions like broadcast flag or Do Not Track, but I am opposed to forcing them upon the Internet and digital markets in a top-down, centrally-planned fashion. While I am skeptical that either scheme would work well in practice (whether voluntary or mandated), my concern in these debates is that forcing such solutions by law will have many unintended consequences, not the least of which will be the gradual growth of invasive cyberspace controls in these or other contexts. After all, if we can have “broadcast flags” and “Do Not Track” schemes, why not “flag” mandates for objectionable speech or “Do Not Porn” browser mandates? Continue reading →

SHARE: 3 comments

Private Media Providers Shouldn’t Be Forced to Fund Public Media

by on October 31, 2010 · 2 comments

I sincerely hope it was a Washington Post editor, and not New America Foundation president Steve Coll, who picked the title for his editorial today, “Why Fox News Should Help Fund NPR.”  After all, Coll certainly must be smart enough to know that there is no law or regulation on the books today that gives the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or any other agency the ability to force private media providers to fund their public media competitors.  Moreover, it takes a lot of chutzpah to try to spin NPR’s recent Juan Williams fiasco into an excuse for private media providers like Fox News to fund NPR, but, shockingly, that’s exactly what Coll does. “The Williams imbroglio is teachable, but its lessons actually point in the opposite direction: America’s public media system, including NPR, requires more funding, not less.”  Hmm… that’s not exactly the lesson most of the rest of the world took away from this episode!

Coll first argues it makes sense for private media funds to be transferred to NPR becuase “In this time of niche publications and cable networks that thrive on ideological anger, we should be seeking to strengthen NPR’s role as a convener of the public square, a demagogue-free zone where all political and social groups — including conservatives and others opposed to federal funding of public media — should be welcome on equal terms.”  This is indicative of the all-too-common “progressive” impulse to force media upon us that we don’t want or even find offensive.  To be clear, I am not one of those people who finds NPR to be a hopelessly biased bastion of Leftist thinking.  While I think it’s clear to everyone that many of NPR’s stories and reporters do lean that direction, I also think there’s some outstanding reporting to be found there.  But if Steve Coll and his colleagues at the New America Foundation want to see NPR get more funding, they should do the same thing I do:  Open up their wallets and make the voluntary choice to fund it. To force everyone else to do so is despicable.

Continue reading →

SHARE: 2 comments

Crovitz on the First Amendment, Parenting & “The Technology of Decency”

by on July 26, 2010 · 2 comments

The always-excellent Wall Street Journal “Information Age” columnist L. Gordon Crovitz has another editorial worth reading today, which builds on the Second Circuit’s recent decision to reverse FCC content regulation for broadcasting.  In “The Technology of Decency,” Crovitz explains “parents don’t need the FCC to protect their children.” “Technology makes it easier to block seven or any number of dirty words,” he notes. “Taking the FCC out of regulating indecency might just lead to more decency by refocusing responsibility where it belongs: on broadcasters and parents.”

That’s a point I’ve hammered on her in the past and in all my work on parental empowerment solutions, including my book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Protection: A Survey of Tools and Methods.” Indeed, there has never been a time in our nation’s history when parents have had more tools and methods at their disposal to help them decide what is acceptable in their homes and in the lives of their children.  And, luckily, poll after poll shows that parents are stepping up to the plate and taking on that responsibility (contrary to what some policymakers in Washington imply).

Moreover, legally speaking, Crovitz shows why the old rationales for regulating broadcasting differently no longer work. “No medium is likely ever to be as pervasive as broadcasting once was,” he notes. He goes on to note that: Continue reading →

SHARE: 2 comments

PFF’s Mega-Filing in the FCC’s “Future of Media” Proceeding

by on May 5, 2010 · 12 comments

The Progress & Freedom Foundation today filed comments in the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) “Future of Media” proceeding. Berin Szoka, Ken Ferree, and I urged the FCC to “reject Chicken Little-esque calls for extreme media ‘reform’ solutions,” and counseled policymakers to move cautiously so that media reform can be “organic and bottom-up, not driven by heavy-handed, top-down industrial policies for the press.”

Our 79-page filing covers a wide range of ideas being examined by Washington policymakers to help struggling media outlets and unemployed journalists, or to expand public media / “public interest” content and regulation. Among the major issues explored in our filing:

  • First Amendment concerns implicated by government subsidies;
  • The pitfalls of imposing new “public interest” obligations on media operators;
  • How advertising restrictions could harm the provision of media and news;
  • Taxes, fees and other regulations to be avoided;
  • The limited role in reform that public media subsidies can play; and
  • Positive steps government could take.

We note that as “With many operators struggling to cope with intensifying competition, digitization, declining advertising budgets, and fragmenting audiences, some pundits and policymakers are wondering what the ‘future of media’ entails. The answer: Nobody knows.”  While this uncertainty has put concerned policymakers at the ready to “help” the press, we warn that: “There is great danger in rash government intervention.” Instead, policymakers should be “careful to not inhibit potentially advantageous marketplace developments, even if some are highly disruptive.” Marketplace meddling, or government attempts to tinker with private media business models in the hopes that something new and better can be created, are misguided. Moreover, “Our constitutional traditions warn against it, history suggests it would be unwise, and practical impediments render such meddling largely unworkable, anyway.”

Continue reading →

SHARE: 12 comments

A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC

by on December 2, 2009 · 147 comments

I’ve just released a new PFF white paper looking at the hysteria that has often accompanied major media mergers and then taking a look at the marketplace reality years after the fact.  Here‘s the PDF, but I have also pasted the entire thing down below.

_____________________________

A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria: From AOL-Time Warner to Comcast-NBC

by Adam Thierer

Although the pending union of Comcast and NBC Universal has not yet made it to the altar, Chicken Little-esque wails about the marriage have already begun in earnest. For example, the pro-regulatory media organization Free Press has already set up a website to complain about the deal.[1] And Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, has called it “an unholy marriage.”[2] The fever only promises to spread once the deal is formally announced, and a lengthy fight over the deal is expected at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and whichever antitrust agency reviews the deal.[3]

But reality tends to play out somewhat less dramatically than the script penned by the media worrywarts. It’s worth looking back at some of the more prominent examples of media merger hysteria in recent years to understand why such panic is unwarranted, and why a deal between Comcast and NBC Universal is unlikely to lead to the sort of problems that the pessimists suggest.[4] Continue reading →

SHARE: 147 comments

Let’s Make a Deal: Broadcasters, Mobile Broadband, and a Market in Spectrum

by on November 10, 2009 · 6 comments

Along with my colleague Barbara Esbin, the Director of PFF’s Center for Communications and Competition Policy, I have just released a new paper on discussing the possibility of reallocating a portion of broadcast television spectrum for alternative purposes, namely, mobile broadband. As I discussed here before, Blair Levin, the Executive Director of the FCC’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative, has been suggesting that it might be possible to craft a grand bargain whereby broadcasters get cash for some (or all) of their current spectrum allocations if they return spectrum to the FCC for reallocation and re-auction, likely to mobile broadband services.

In our paper, “An Offer They Can’t Refuse: Spectrum Reallocation That Can Benefit Consumers, Broadcasters & the Mobile Broadband Sector,” [PDF] Barbara and I argue that:

the benefits of such a deal could be enormous for wireless broadband providers, developers of digital technologies, and consumers.  Expanding the pool of spectrum available for next-generation wireless broadband offerings will ensure that innovative new networks, devices, and services are made available to the public on a timely basis.  Ultimately, that will mean more high-speed choices for consumers, especially those in rural areas harder to reach with high-speed wireline networks.  Finally, more generally, anything that moves us in the direction of a freer market in spectrum is a good thing. But fairness to broadcasters lies at the heart of this spectrum reallocation plan. If a deal can’t be structured that broadcasters would find acceptable, they should not be forced to come to the table. When we speak of an offer they can’t refuse, we mean one so attractive that no rational businessperson or investor would pass it up. It is essential broadcasters be willing partners in the deal, and be full participants in the process of shaping its contours.

Read the entire thing here, or below the fold as a Scribd document. Continue reading →

SHARE: 6 comments

Don’t Worry about the Fairness Doctrine. No, Wait, Strike That.

by on February 18, 2009 · 9 comments

Matt Lasar of Ars tells us not to worry about the Fairness Doctrine being revived, only to go on and cite several lawmakers who have said they’d like to revive it. Meanwhile, over at the American Spectator, somebody called “The Prowler” seems to have all sorts of unnamed sources on the Hill telling him the Fairness Doctrine will be revived any day now.

Who knows what to believe. But let’s keep our eye on the real issue here. The danger is not that the Fairness Doctrine gets back on the books in the same form; it’s that versions of it sneak in through the back door via other regulatory initiatives. As Cord Blomquist pointed out here last April, “localism is the new Fairness Doctrine.”  There are a lot of people are running around Washington today insisting that government must intervene in the marketplace to “save media localism” and “strengthen the public interest obligations” of local TV and radio broadcasters.  There’s been an FCC proceeding open on this issue for some time, and everything about it reeks of the Fairness Doctrine in drag.

This effort is being spearheaded by the media reformistas whose short-term goal is to reinvigorate the amorphous “public interest standard” such that the FCC has open-ended powers to regulate everything under the sun going forward. That’s why a key part of the “localism” battle is their effort to breathe new life into “ascertainment rules,” which used to be more formal and required broadcasters to strictly report everything they aired and did in their communities. There’s lots of talk of ensuring more “accountability” from broadcasters regarding how they serve their local communities, and there’s even rumblings of “local community boards” who will sit as mini-free speech Star Chambers and pass judgment on whether local media outlets are doing their job.  Again, it’s all just the Fairness Doctrine by another name. Continue reading →

SHARE: 9 comments

← Previous Entries