Regulation

Ibrahim Samra says he was fired from WWJ-TV has filed suit against the station, alleging he was discriminated and retaliated against after complaining about what he saw as its anti-Arab bias.

A search advertiser can’t proceed in court with claims that Google conspired with Apple to avoid competing in the search business, a federal judge has ruled. In a dismissal order, U.S. District Court Judge Pitts in the Northern District of California completely threw out the advertiser’s claims against Apple, and sent the claims against Google to arbitration because its contract with advertisers requires arbitration of disputes.

TV station owners, beset by threats to ad revenue and pay-TV distribution fees, will soon “take more aggressive action” in Washington in an effort to relax station ownership caps locally and nationally, according to one Wall Street analyst. New Street Research’s Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff, said recent regulatory and enforcement actions taken by the FCC will likely prompt TV station owners to take on rules that stand in the away of consolidation.

The FCC has released its first EEO audit notice for 2024. Those stations, and the station employment units (commonly owned or controlled stations serving the same area sharing at least one employee) with which they are associated, must provide to the FCC their last two years of EEO Annual Public File reports, as well as backing data to show that the station in fact did everything that was required under the FCC rules.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a law that prohibits social media platforms from allowing anyone under 14 to create or maintain accounts, and also requires tech platforms to obtain parental consent before allowing 14- or 15-year olds to create or maintain accounts.

Requiring TV stations to reach carriage deals with cable operators to avoid signal blackouts is barred by long-standing federal law and regulations, according to Nexstar Media Group in a filing today with the FCC. Nexstar is trying to fend off a Hawaiian Telcom complaint over a carriage dispute last July that led to a three-week signal blackout. Hawaiian Telcom insisted in an FCC complaint that Nexstar violated agency retransmission consent rules by going dark instead of extending their negotiations a few extra days.

Apple, Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms face the risk of potentially hefty fines as the European Union opened a full-blown investigation into the firms’ compliance with strict new laws reining in the power of Big Tech. The European Commission said Monday that Apple and Google’s app store rules will be targeted in the first probes under the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, how Google search results might unfairly preference its own services and how Apple may make it harder for users to choose alternatives to its Safari browser.

Some see the TikTok bill as the best chance for now to regulate the tech industry and set a precedent, if a narrow one focused on just one company. President Joe Biden has said he would sign the House bill, which overwhelmingly passed 362-65 this month after a rare 50-0 committee vote moving it to the floor. But it’s already running into roadblocks in the Senate, where there is little unanimity on the best approach to ensure that China doesn’t access private data from the app’s 170 million U.S. users or influence them through its algorithms. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

AWARN’s John Lawson: The ATSC 3.0 transition is stalled. A new public-private partnership could jump start it.

David Oxenford: To conclude that it is deregulation, not marketplace forces, that is decreasing localism is to ignore the media marketplace generally.

The FCC has hit Nexstar Media Group and its business partner Mission Broadcasting with a $1.2 million fine and an order to sell WPIX New York or other stations to come into compliance with longstanding station ownership limits. The commission on Thursday issued a 42-page decision in its probe of Nexstar’s ties to Mission Broadcasting and whether their business agreement violated the FCC’s reach limit on TV station ownership.

She will serve as a spokesperson for the association and will help develop and execute messaging strategies to advance broadcasters’ policy agenda before Congress and the FCC.

Abbott Elementary and its creator and star, Quinta Brunson, are out of legal detention. A judge in New York dismissed a lawsuit against Brunson, 34, and ABC filed by writer Christine Davis in 2021, claiming the hit sitcom was a “veritable knock-off” of her show This School Year. According to the court decision, the judge found that “no discerning observer would find the works to be substantially similar.”

The U.S. fiscal year 2025 budget has funds for broadband expansion, tech innovation and digital equity.

A federal judge in New York on Wednesday tossed out DirecTV’s price-fixing case against three TV station owners – including Nexstar Media Group – on the basis that the satellite TV provider lacked antitrust standing to wage the court battle. DirecTV “has failed to show that it suffered ‘a special kind of antitrust injury,’ and therefore lacks antitrust standing to bring this suit,” U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel said in a 17-page opinion.

DirecTV, on a Sunday of all things, decided to announce its “No Locals” plan that allows satellite subscribers to drop local TV stations and save $12 monthly or $140 annually. Dish and DirecTV have must-carry and retransmission consent obligations like cable. But satellite TV providers are not required to make their subscribers buy local TV stations before buying the tier with all the cable channels. Could cable adopt Dish’s Flex Pack or DirecTV’s No Locals approach? Since it involves regulation, it’s complicated.

Former President Donald Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against ABC News on Monday, arguing that the anchor George Stephanopoulos had harmed his reputation by saying multiple times on-air that the former president had been found liable for raping the writer E. Jean Carroll.

Meta Platforms on Monday asked a federal appeals court for an emergency injunction halting an FTC in-house hearing that could result in a ban on monetizing teens’ data. The social media platform contends that FTC in-house hearings are unconstitutional — in part, because the FTC acts as both prosecutor and judge at in-house hearings.

The Supreme Court seemed wary Monday of imposing harsh limits on how federal officials communicate with social media platforms about content moderation decisions. Sharply questioning both sides, the justices sought to determine when it is appropriate for the government to encourage the platforms to remove controversial content — if ever.

The justices must distinguish between persuading social media sites to take down posts, which is permitted, and coercing them, which violates the First Amendment.

Legal battle would force courts to weigh the government’s national security objectives against the First Amendment rights of TikTok and its users.

The state of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida will be raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from online sports betting this decade, thanks to a compact between the tribe and Gov. Ron DeSantis that gave the tribe exclusive rights to run sports wagers as well as casino gambling on its reservations. But are these online wagers on the outcome of sporting events legally on tribal land, when really only the computer servers are located there, accepting bets made using mobile phones and computers from anywhere in Florida? Pictured: The guitar shaped hotel at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla. (Brynn Anderson/AP)

Allergist/immunologist, baseball lover Milo Vassallo leads the Media and Democracy Project in a struggle with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

On the two-year anniversary of the attack in Ukraine that claimed the lives of Fox News photojournalist Pierre Zakrzewski and contractor Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, the network was accused Thursday of being culpable for the fatal incident by engaging in “reckless and negligent conduct” that put the crew in harm’s way. The network was also accused of launching “a campaign of material misrepresentations and omissions to hide its own accountability for the disaster and shift blame” to then-security contractor Shane Thomson, who allegedly warned against the crew entering the dangerous zone near Kyiv where they were killed.

A majority of the FCC on Thursday voted to redefine broadband as speeds of at least 100 megabits per second for downloads — a fourfold increase from the current standard of 25 Mbps, which was set nine years ago. The new benchmark for upload speeds is 20 Mbps — nearly seven times faster than the current 3 Mbps standard. The FCC also set a long-term goal of 1 Gbps for downloads and 500 Mbps for uploads.

Dozens of popular figures on the app have traveled to Washington to urge lawmakers to oppose a bill that could result in the platform being blocked in the United States.

Cable and satellite-TV providers will need to make sure bills and ads clearly display a total price for video subscribers, including extra fees that can amount to hundreds of dollars a year, under a rule adopted Thursday by the FCC. “No one likes surprises on their bill,” Democratic FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. “The advertised price for a service should be the price you pay when your bill arrives. It shouldn’t include a bunch of unexpected junk fees.”