Policy Blog Entries by Harold Feld

Time Warner and Comcast have announced a new pilot program for their TV Anywhere initiative. The 5,000 customers in the pilot will get access to cable programming content not otherwise available online — as long as they prove they subscribe to a subscription video service — or “MVPD” — like cable or FIOS. (MVPD stands for “multichannel video programming distributor” and means anything that sells you a whole bunch of cable channels.

Sometime back, I warned that the deal between ESPN360.com and Verizon would have consequences in terms of internet fragmentation. Now, the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators (who often have very different concerns from their larger cousins in the National Cable Telecommunications Association) is complaining that Disney wants to charge them for access to ESPN.com.

Note, this does not mean put stuff behind a pay wall and charge viewers. It means replicating the cable model and charging the ISP on a per-subscriber basis.

Last week, we filed comments in the FCC’s open Notice of Inquiry on what to put in the National Broadband Plan. Among other things, we called for a “mindful” federal (and state and local) policy that looked to leverage opportunities to advance broadband deployment and adoption as part o our policy efforts generally and not just in its own little “broadband” pigeonhole.

The Broadband Conduit Deployment Act of 2009 (BCPA) is an excellent example of what we mean by “mindful” federal policy. Introduced on the House side by Rep.

Verizon has supposedly shown a new willingness to discuss adding a “fifth network neutrality principle” on non-discrimination in addition to the existing four principles in the Internet Policy Statement.

At long last, it looks like the Senate Republicans got their act together enough to settle on two FCC candidates: Current Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell and former NTIA Administrator Meredith Atwell Baker. While I expect a fair number of policy fights, I also expect to see this group weighing matters fairly and searching for common ground.

Both Baker and McDowell are fully up to speed on the gamut of media and telecom issues. Neither comes with a lot of incumbent industry baggage. Prior to joining the FCC, McDowell worked for Comptel representing competing telephone companies.

The Senate Commerce Committee has announced confirmation hearings for Larry Strickling as head of NTIA and Aneesh Chopra for CTO. Hopefully, swift confirmation by the full Senate will follow.

I really can’t stress too much how important it is to get the Administration up to full strength. Which is why the delay in confirmation for Genachowski, Adelstein, and Clyburn are is unfortunate. Everyone understands the time pressure to start spending stimulus money. But that hardly covers the damage of having the major telecom and IT elements of the Administration stuck in a holding pattern. I’m sitting here at the Free Press Changing Media Summit where everyone is debating the urgency of resolving dozens of critical issues — from the issue du jour of saving newspapers to the insanely detailed problem of special access.

The big news today is the Supreme Court's ruling in FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc., wherein the Court reversed the Second Circuit's determination that the FCC acted arbitrarily when it found that "fleeting expletives" uttered by Bono, Cher and Nichole Ritchie at various televised-live award ceremonies were "indecent."  It is not, however, the indecency/broadcst free speech issues that make this case a big [obscene gerrund] deal from my perspective. Rather, the case should have significant impact on the pending Comcast/BitTorrent case now pending in the DC Circuit.

Time Warner is among the cable companies slowly expanding its usage caps. Time Warner argues it needs these caps to pay for expanding capacity. As Ars Technica notes this doesn’t really bear up under close scrutiny. Indeed, “we need to do this to pay for all the infrastructure you want” has become the sort of all purpose excuse that covers just about anything. As I’ve said since Time Warner first announced their plans to test this approach last year, this is probably the least offensive short term way to handle the fact that Time Warner and other cable operators built crappy systems, but it has very unfortunate results in the long term. Notably, it screws up our national broadband policy. Metered pricing is about discouraging use.

Alec Ross, a co-founder and former Executive VP of One Economy and a major presence in the Obama campaign and transition team on tech policy has been appointed Senior Adviser on Innovation to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. This continues the trend in the Obama Administration to treat broadband and information technology as an integral part of overall policy, and appointing folks steeped in tech and broadband to important positions, rather than relying primarily on folks from traditional carriers or cable.

I should say I’ve known Alec for a number of years and I like and admire him enormously.

One of the standard ways in Washington to influence administrative processes is via Congressional Oversight Hearings. Mind you, Congress is supposed to exercise reasonable oversight over the Administration, so this is a feature rather than a bug. But it also means that professional tea-leaf readers focus on these hearings to see what witnesses get called, who says what, and how vigorously they say it. Often, triangulating backwards, it gives insight into what industry is pressing as the most critical points — with Members then digging in to the issues (or, if one is cynical, doing the bidding of their corporate masters).

The hearing only had audio webcast going, so it was often difficult for me to tell who was saying what. But by and large, it seemed that Members were primarily in listening mode rather than heavily pressing for this or that particular outcome.