News Headlines from the Jan. 13 Radioshow: NJ Outlaws Pirates, Indiana Senate Considers Massive Telecom Dereg, more…

These are the news headlines as read on the Jan. 13, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow: NJ Passes Anti-Pirate Radio Law; Indiana Senate Considering Radical Telecom Deregulation; FCC Accepting Comments on Local Cable TV; FCC Chair Says ‘Yes’ to Network Neutrality, and ‘Yes’ to Two-Tiered Internet; Groups Urge FCC Not To Expedite TV Station License Renewals

Communications legislation at the state level tops the news this week.

NJ Passes Anti-Pirate Radio Law
New Jersey has become the second state to make unlicensed radio broadcasting a state felony, following Florida which passed such a law last year. The New Jersey state Senate voted in favor of the anti-pirate bill unanimously, 38-0, and governor Richard Cody signed it into law on Jan. 13.

The law had been pushed for hard by the New Jersey Broadcasters Association, whose members are feeling pinched by large broadcasters from New York City on the North and Philadelphia on the South which dominate much of the State’s airwaves. Apparently the NJBA can’t get a law passed outlawing out-of-state broadcasters, so instead they took aim at unlicensed broadcasters, although there are no indication that pirates are as rampant as they are in Florida, largely acknowledged as the nation’s hot spot for pirate radio.

Now that unlicensed broadcasting is a crime in New Jersey, local and state law enforcement are permitted to track down and shut down unlicensed stations. No doubt, the NJBA intends to aid police with the tracking down part of the equation.

According to the NJBA web site, the association is planning to distribute commercials for member stations to air, “alerting listeners to this new law, and what to do if a pirate station interferes with their favorite local station.”

Indiana Senate Considering Radical Telecom Deregulation
Over in Indiana, the state Senate is looking at a bill that would radically deregulate telecomm law there. The Homeland Security, Utilities and Public Policy Committee approved by a 8-2 vote a bill that would let telephone companies set their own rates without state intervention as soon as 2009.

If passed, the bill would also move cable TV franchising to the state level, similar to what happened in Texas last year. Such a change would limit the ability of local municipalities to push for public service and public access channels in exchange for companies’ use of the public right-of-way.

The bill would also further hamstring municipalities by placing restrictions on their ability to deploy broadband networks.

Supporters of the bill, including former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey who testified in front of the Indiana Senate committee, argue that radically relaxing the rules would bolster competition.

But opponents of the bill argue otherwise. Linton, Indiana, is one of only two cities in the state with its own broadband network. Linton mayor Tom Jones said the bill’s stiff rules for municipal broadband networks would deny citizens access to new and developing technologies.
The Indiana bill represents just one battle in a nationwide war the telecommunications industry is waging to get states to individually deregulate their industry and pull power away from local municipalities to the state level where lobbiests have more access and centralized resources.

FCC Accepting Comments on Local Cable TV
Currently the FCC is exploring the issue of cable TV franchising, mostly with regard to whether or not local municipalities are “unreasonably refusing to grant
competitive franchises,” and if the FCC should intervene at the local or state level.

The Center for Digital Democracy warns on its website that the true intent of the proposal in front of the FCC is to “overturn perhaps the most important remaining public interest media safeguard.” The Center notes that, “local franchising is the only method that can ensure that the public is even modestly served by the communications giants.”

The FCC opened this proposal for rulemaking last November and is accepting comments from the public until Feb. 13. To learn how to send your comments to the FCC go to the mediageek website – www.mediageek.net – and click on “comment to the FCC” on the right hand column.

FCC Chair Says ‘Yes’ to Network Neutrality, and ‘Yes’ to Two-Tiered Internet
In the last few weeks here on mediageek I’ve been talking quite a bit about the concept of “network neutrality,” which is where broadband providers don’t block content to subscribers, even if it’s not something they directly profit from. The issue has been coming to the fore in recent months because the big telephone companies, like AT&T and Verizon, are getting into the business of providing cable TV services over internet lines, and they’re making noises like they don’t want their subscription services to have to compete with free and competitor’s video on the Internet.

On January 6 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin came out strongly against broadband internet providers filtering content to subscribers. In a public question and answer session, Martin said, “It is critical that consumers continue to have the access, and unfettered access, to all of the Internet.” He continued, saying, “I think that Washington and policymakers will be concerned if we are talking about network providers blocking access to content.” Martin stresses that the FCC is going to be committed to network neutrality.

However, Martin was hesitant to commit the FCC to making rules to enforce network neutrality, saying that he doesn’t have evidence that any internet content is being blocked.

Martin also drew a distinction between network neutrality and tiers of service. He told the CES audience, “Some want a lower speed, and for other consumers, it may be worth more to them to pay for a better quality of service or better speed.” That attitude worries public interest advocates, who foresee a two tiered internet that reserves rich audio and video content for the wealthiest customers.

Indeed, dividing the internet by access speed and bandwidth, may be the way the big telcos can effectively filter content without explicitly filtering content. As I mentioned last week, companies like Verizon and AT&T are trying to charge big internet companies like Yahoo and Google for the bandwidth used by the videos and other media content they provide to consumers.

Such a policy may give the telcos a way to block content from websites that don’t pay their fee, — most likely to be nonprofit and amateur sites that don’t have the profits or revenues of the big dot-coms.

On Jan. 10, BellSouth Chief Executive Officer Duane Ackerman told the Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference that as more bandwidth-intensive content is available online, broadband providers will have to negotiate more with content providers, concluding, “There will ultimately need to be some commercial agreements established.”

Groups Urge FCC Not To Expedite TV Station License Renewals
Two weeks ago guest John Anderson and I discussed an Iowa group’s challenge to the license of a Sinclair-owned TV station in Cedar Rapids. On January 11, three groups sent a letter to the FCC Chair, urging the commission to be careful with rubber stamping the license renewals of TV stations.

The Campaign Legal Center, Benton Foundation and the United Church of Christ are concerned by comments made by FCC Media Bureau Chief Donna Gregg that expediting the license renewal process will be a priority at the bureau. According to the groups’ letter, “for broadcasters to be effective public trustees, the FCC must appropriately exercise its statutory responsibility of holding them accountable for fulfilling their public interest and programming obligations.”

Already license renewals for broadcast television stations are largely a pro forma process, although in the last couple of years viewers groups have taken to challenging the licenses of stations they believe are not providing adequate public service in the form of news and public affairs programming.

Although all broadcast stations are by law supposed to serve the public interest, convenience and necessity in exchange for their free license, since the Reagan administration this has become a mostly toothless admonition rather than an enforceable requirement.

News Headlines from the Jan. 6 Radioshow: New FCC Commissioners Sworn In; No Indecency Fines for 2005; CBS Splits from Viacom; Texas Is IPTV Frontier, but Problems Ahead for Public Interest

These are the media news headlines as read on the Jan. 6, 2006 edition of the mediageek radioshow:

FCC Commissioners Sworn In
On Jan. 3 Michael Copps and Deborah Taylor Tate were sworn in as FCC Comissioners. This will be a second term for Copps, a Democrat who has been on the FCC since 2001, and he remain on the commission through June 30, 2010. Tate is a Republican.

With the exit of Rebublican Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy at the end of the last Congressional term, the FCC remains one commissioner short, with two Democrats and two Republicans. That split likely will continue to slow the introduction of controversial issues for action, like revising media ownership rules.

There are still no clear candidates for the open commission seat. The Bush Administration has largely ceded responsibility for choosing the next commissioner to Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Stephens of Alaska.

2006 will be a busy and important year for communications policy and legislation, so the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans are not going to want to be caught in any deadlocks at the FCC.

No Indecency Fines for 2005
One issue that’s been waiting on the table for action has been broadcast indecency. In fact, the entire year of 2005 passed by without the FCC issueing a single fine for indecent content. This, despite the fact that 189,362 complaints were filed with the FCC, more than in any other year except 2004, where the Janet Jackson superbowl halftime helped push the complaint total over a million.

The FCC’s enforcement bureau has reportedly assembled a package of fines and dismissals for the commissioners to vote on as a package, but it has not yet come up for action, even though most commission watchers believed it would before the end of 2005.

CBS Splits from Viacom
On January 3 CBS officially became an independent company again, making its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, after separating from media giant Viacom, and its former siblings like MTV and Paramount Pictures. But that doesn’t mean that CBS is just a television network. The company takes with it such properties as the UPN broadcast network, the Showtime cable network, King World television syndication, and the newly renamed CBS radio, formerly known as Infinity.

That leaves CBS as the second largest radio and TV station owner in the country, by revenue. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp remains the nation’s largest TV owner, and Clear Channel the largest radio owner.

Texas Is IPTV Frontier, but Problems Ahead for Public Interest
Texas is turning out to be the nation’s hotbed for television provided over broadband internet lines, called IPTV. The newly renamed AT&T, formerly SBC, announced on January 5 that it will begin offering cable television service over broadband to select customers in San Antonio, with up to several hundred customers getting the service within a few months.

There are still several technical issues that AT&T is working on, which is why the company is taking the rollout slowly. At a public demonstration in November some of the advanced features that AT&T is touting didn’t actually work correctly when the company tried to show them off to Texas Governor Rick Perry who attended the demo.

The nation’s other new telephone giant, Verizon, won’t be left too far behind in this race. That company announced that it will make its IPTV system available to one million potential viewers in the Dallas area by the end of 2006.

In order to accommodate the much higher quantity of data necessary for broadcast quality video, both companies are increasing the capacity of their networks. Verizon is bringing high-capacity fiber optic network lines directly to subscribers’ homes, which greatly increases the bandwidth subscribers can theoretically have access to. AT&T is taking a more conservative approach, bringing fiber lines closer to subscribers homes, but not actually running fiber directly to subscribers.

The reason why Texas is the place for IPTV is because last year Gov. Perry signed legislation that brought cable television franchising to the state level. In the rest of the nation, each new cable operator has to negotiate with individual municipalities to begin offering cable TV-like services. Verizon and AT&T have led the fight against local franchises, and they won that battle in Texas, where they are now taking advantage of their state franchises to roll out television services.

While the IPTV looks like a win for consumers because it promises additional choices and competition for television services, there are also several potential snags that consumer groups are watching.

One potential loser with non-local franchising and IPTV is public access TV. The provision of these channels by cable companies is negotiated by local municipalities, and is one of the few points of leverage left for cities over their local media. Negotiating cable franchises on a state or national level threatens to lower the provision of public access to the lowest common denominator, potentially shafting cities that have grown vibrant public access stations.

Another snag is known as “network neutrality.” If a company like AT&T is providing both television and broadband access over the same network to subscriber homes, what’s to stop the company from filtering out video content available on the internet so that it doesn’t compete with its own IPTV offerings? At the moment, the answer is nothing, there is no law or regulation that prevents that from happening. Further, the heads of AT&T and Verizon have made it clear that they want to reserve that right.

Meanwhile, the big phone companies, including AT&T and Verizon, are gearing up to start charging large internet content providers for carrying their high-bandwidth multimedia content.

On Jan. 5 Verizon Communications Inc. Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg told reporters that his company is in favor of charging companies that provide content like movies over broadband, saying, “We have to make sure they don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity,”

According to an article in the Jan. 6 edition of the Wall Street Journal, the nation’s major broadband providers are in favor of a system whereby content providers would pay a fee in order to ensure their data receives priority treatment on broadband networks.

Providers of content and services, however, see it differently. Jeffrey Citron, chief executive of internet telephone service provider Vonage told the Journal, “They want to charge us for the bandwidth the customer has already paid for.” Any provider of Internet content also has to pay for its connection to the Internet, and providing services like video or high-fidelity audio already requires expensive high-speed connections.

In essence, what the telephone providers want is the ability to filter out, or slow down access to content they don’t own or directly profit from.

Such a pay-to-play scheme would be especially detrimental to non-corporate content. How many community radio stations or independent video producers could afford to pay additional fees to AT&T to guarantee their programs make it to internet users beyond the bandwidth fees they already pay to get their content on the internet in the first place?

The net effect of telecom companies being able to restrict or prioritize internet content would be the creation of a two-tiered internet with regard to the distribution and sharing of content. Only producers who can afford to pay additional fees imposed by the telephone companies would be able to see their content make it to internet-wired homes, regardless of the fees they already pay for internet service.

This issue of network neutrality will be the subject of much debate in Congress and the FCC in 2006. As part of the FCC’s approval of the AT&T and Verizon mergers last year, the commission imposed limp-wristed and temporary network neutrality conditions on both companies.

The telecomm companies and internet companies are all busy lobbying Congress on this and other issues right now as legislators are assembling what will become the Telecommunications Act of 2006. Here at mediageek I will continue to keep you informed about what’s going on, what it means, and what you can do about it.

News Headlines from the 11-25-05 Radioshow: Warner Pays for Payola; Abernathy Leaving FCC One Commissioner Short; UK Pirate Sweep

These are the news headlines as read on the Nov. 25 edition of the mediageek radioshow: Warner Pays for Payola; Abernathy Leaving FCC One Commissioner Short; UK Pirate Sweep

Warner Pays for Payola
Warner Music Group is the next major recording label to settle payola charges with New York State attorney general, Elliot Spitzer. According to documents released Nov. 22 by Spitzer’s office, Warner Music, part of the Time-Warner-Turner media empire, has agreed to pay $5 million to fund music and education programs. Warner also agreed to to stop making payoffs in return for airplay, and to fully disclose all so-called items of value provided to radio stations.

New York’s attorney general alleges that Warner used pay-for-play to bolster the radio play for hit bands like Green Day, My Chemical Romance and R.E.M. He says that the practice was “condoned by senior executives at Warner Music record labels.”

In June of this year Sony Music agreed to pay $10 million in order to settle payola charges.

In his announcement of the settlement, Spitzer made it clear that the recording labels are not the only parties responsible for payola practices. He said that radio stations make requests for gifts, and that stations owned by Infinity and Clear Channel are most active in soliciting payola bribes.

Spitzer is still investigating the two other major record corporations — Universal Music Group and EMI Group — as well as several radio companies, including the nation’s largest broadcasters, Clear Channel Communications Inc., Infinity Broadcasting Corp. and Entercom Communications Corp.

In one e-mail released by Spitzer, a Warner Bros. Records employee described the program director of Infinity’s WAQZ-FM in Cincinnati as “a whore.” The implication of this title is that the station’s playlist is essentially for sale to record companies.

In a written statement FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein praised Attorney General Sptizer, saying,
“The settlement with Warner Music Group adds more dirt to the mountain of evidence that payola is pervasive in the music business.” Adelstein went on to say, “The FCC needs to act on this evidence and conclude as soon as possible the investigation we are now undertaking.”

Abernathy Leaving FCC One Commissioner Short
The FCC will be short one more commissioner come Dec. 9, when Republican Kathleen Abernathy will step down. Abernathy’s term at the Commission actually ended at the beginning of the year, but she stayed on board because the Bush Administration has yet to nominate her successor, and the FCC has an empty seat from when former chairman Michael Powell left in the Spring.

Thus the FCC has had just two democratic to two republican commissioner, rather than the 3 republican to 2 democrat split that is typical during a Republican administration.
The result of the empty republican seats at the commission has been that the two democratic commissioners have had a little more power to force compromise in the agenda of Chairman Kevin Martin.

Although the president recently announced his nominee to fill the chair vacated by Powell, his nominee will not be confirmed before commissioner Abernathy leaves, and so Martin will continue to be stuck without a republican majority.

Abernathy term’s on the FCC was not marked by many independent positions or campaigns, and she could largely be expected to support her fellow commission republicans. She backed big media mergers, like Rupert Muroch’s News Corp purchase of Direct TV, and supported former chairman Powell’s efforts to further relax media ownership rules.

The task of finding a replacement for Abernathy has been left to Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Stevens, but the Senator has yet to announce any potential nominees.

UK Pirate Sweep

On Oct. 29 the British version of the FCC, called OfCom, conducted a sweep of pirate radio stations across the country, shutting down 44 stations. Many of these stations had been on the air for years, and, like many unlicensed stations in the US, they served minority communities that aren’t well served by the mainstream media.

Although community radio licenses have started to become available in the UK, only 2 of the 48 licenses set to be awarded next year will go to stations run by the country’s substantial Carribean minority.

Like their FCC brethren, Ofcom officials justified the pirate crackdown by connecting unlicensed stations to interference with aircraft communications, and criminal activity.

Pirate radio has a long history in the UK, springing up in the 1950s and 60s as a result of monopoly the BBC had on the airwaves at the time, and the fact that the beeb largely ignored popular music like rock n roll. Although the 80s brought independent commercial stations to the UK, by and large they don’t serve communities any better than their American counterparts.

News Headlines from the Oct. 7 Radioshow

These are the news headlines as read on the Oct. 7 edition of the mediageek radioshow: Clear Channel CEO Says Less Regs for Us, More Regs for the Competition; Resurrection of the Broadcast Flag; FCC Chair Wants to Process Indecency Fines in Bulk; CBC Lockout Almost Over.
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News Headlines from the Sept. 23 Radioshow

These are the news headlines as read on the Sept. 23 edition of the mediageek radioshow: Community Media Activists Speak Out Against Legislation; Roundup Bringing Western LPFMs Together; CT Cops Run Racist Pirate Radio Station; CPB Says It Doesn’t Have To Be Open; Radio Station for Katrina Evacuees Shuts Down.
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Headline News from Aug. 19 Radioshow

These are some of the news headlines as read on the Aug. 19, 2005 edition of the radioshow: Media Ownership Back on FCC Table in 30-60 Days; Two Big Telecomm Mergers on the Horizon; SBC Spends Big in Texas; CBC Labor Lockout; Indecency Complaints Down; Muni Broadband a Hot Topic with State Legislators.
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Headlines from the 6-24-05 radioshow: FCC Busts rfb, Harasses BLR; Some CPB Funding Saved, but New Republican CEO

These are the news headlines as read on the June 24, 2005 edition of the mediageek radioshow: FCC Busts radio free brattleboro, Harasses Berkeley Liberation Radio; Some CPB Funding Saved, but New Republican CEO.
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News Headlines from the April 11 mediageek radioshow

These are the news headlines that were supposed to be read on last Friday’s mediageek radio show, but some technical difficulties resulted in me not having them to read, and the show not getting recorded. But you can still read them.

Stories include: Murdoch to buy DirecTV; The FCC, Indecency & Ownership; Clear Channel Drops Indy Promoters/Payola
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