I need not remind anyone here about FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s ongoing “war on cable.” Even if you hate the cable industry or capitalism in general, there’s just no way I can see how anyone who believes in the rule of law and good government can support Martin’s incessant abuse of power in his Moby Dick-like crusade against the cable industry. A crusade, incidentally, which happens to be motivated by Chairman Ahab’s desire to control speech on cable television, as I’ll note below.
Anyway, the latest chapter in this miserable saga of government-gone-mad is Martin’s recent effort to begin a far-ranging data gathering effort concerning cable prices and analog-to-digital channel movements under the guise of individual complaint enforcement. In a new paper entitled “Der Undue Prozess at the FCC: Part Deux,” my PFF colleague Barbara Esbin shows, once again, how the FCC’s regular processes and procedures are being perverted by Martin to achieve ends not within the agency’s delegated authority. And the results, in this case, will be profoundly anti-consumer.
Esbin documents the four flaws in the FCC’s investigation as follows:
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When the definitive history of Kevin Martin’s regulatory reign of terror against the cable industry is finally written, I have a feeling that Ted Hearn of Multichannel News will be the man who pens it. There is no one who has been reporting on these issues longer or with more investigative vigor than Ted. In an absolutely scathing piece today about a former Martin staffer, Ted does a nice job summarizing the major elements of Martin’s war on cable. It reads like the list of grievances against King George found in the Declaration. (Think: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”) Anyway, I just thought I’d throw Ted’s list up here for those keeping score at home:
— He secretly rewrote an FCC study issued in November 2004 that had concluded that cable a la carte was a bad idea.
— He walked away from a handshake agreement with NCTA, Comcast and Time Warner that the rollout of family programming packages would end his a la carte jihad.
— He stripped cable’s control over critical wiring in apartment buildings, affirming the identical policy that a court had previously struck down.
— He voided exclusive contracts between cable operators and apartment building owners just a few years after the FCC gave the green light to such deals.
— He required cable operators to carry must carry TV stations in analog and digital for three years after voting against such a policy in February 2005.
— He extended program access rules for five years, a gift to DirecTV and Dish Network even though the two satellite providers are larger than every cable company in the U.S. except Comcast and Time Warner.
— He imposed expensive set-top box equipment mandates on cable, making it vastly more costly for Comcast and Time Warner to reach the goal of all-digital platforms.
— He capped cable ownership at 30% of pay-TV subscribers nationally—the same limit that a federal court kicked back to the FCC as unlawful—while letting AT&T and Verizon basically divide the country’s phone market.
— He slashed cable leased access rates to zero in an act of bureaucratic malice that a federal appeals court has now blocked and that the Office of Management and Budget has rejected as a violation of the Paperwork Reduction Act.
— He decided to brand Comcast an Internet outlaw when all the company did was occasionally frustrate a tiny minority of customers whose massive consumption of Web porn and pirated Hollywood films was destroying the service for others.
As I mentioned yesterday, James Gattuso and I penned an editorial for National Review this week about the growth of FCC regulation and spending in recent years. In the op-ed, we also noted that, “For whatever reason, a disproportionate number of these [new regulatory proposals] have been aimed at cable television, so much so that press and industry analysts now speak of Chairman Martin’s ongoing ‘war on cable.'”
Today, the editors at
National Review have chimed in with an editorial of their own on the issue entitled, “Pulling the Cable on Martin’s Crusade.” Specifically, the editors address what most pundits believe really motivates the Chairman’s crusade against cable: His desire to force cable companies to offer consumers channels on “a la carte” basis in an effort to “clean up” cable TV. “Martin should abandon this particular crusade,” the NR editors argue. “While we are sympathetic to parents’ desire to get the channels they want without having to buy access to racier fare, using economic regulation to restructure an industry is the wrong approach.” They continue:
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With the release last month of its report on Violent Television Programming and Its Impact on Children, the FCC teed up the issue of regulating televised violence and tossed it over to Congress with a recommendation that lawmakers go ahead and swing for the fences. And Congress appears ready to oblige, although not necessarily in the way some at the FCC had originally envisioned.
You will recall that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin used the FCC’s violence report as another opportunity to engage in his monomaniacal, Moby Dick-like quest to impose a la carte regulation on cable and satellite operators. Martin argued that “Requiring cable and satellite television providers to offer programming in a more a la carte manner would be a more content neutral means for Congress to regulate violent programming and therefore would raise fewer constitutional issues.” But it doesn’t appear that the chairman is going to get his whale this time around.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.