FCC

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said Tuesday she is moving forward with a proposal for sweeping broadband regulations that would restore the Obama-era open internet rules. The potential rules will include a key provision that would reclassify broadband as a utility service, regulated under Title II of the Communications Act. That reclassification is a necessary first step toward imposing common carrier requirements.

Anna Gomez has been sworn in as the newest commissioner of the FCC. The Democrat gives Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel the majority she needs to start tackling nonbipartisan issues like potential media regulation and network neutrality rules.

“A fully seated FCC must pursue more ambitious and necessary reforms,” the group wrote. “Specifically, there are three areas where action is necessary to enable vital local news and information our communities need.”

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel issued the following statement on the U.S. Senate confirmation of Anna Gomez to serve a five-year term as an FCC commissioner: “Congratulations to Anna […]

“Her wealth of experience in telecommunications policymaking will help the FCC address the critical issues facing radio and television broadcasters,” reads part of the statement from NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt.

Her confirmation gives Democrats a 3-2 lead.

The Senate on Thursday moved toward confirming a third Democratic commissioner to the FCC, giving the party a working majority on the commission almost three years into President Joe Biden’s presidential term. Anna Gomez (pictured), a telecommunications attorney, was nominated by Biden last May. The Senate voted 55-43 to cut off debate and proceed to a final vote on her nomination, which will take place later on Thursday.

Dueling coalitions — the affiliate-led Coalition for Local News and O&O-led Preserve Viewer Choice Coalition — have raised the temperature on a long-simmering argument over who should be able to negotiate retransmission rights with vMVPDs. The growing size of the vMVPD revenue pot in an awful year for spot TV may have a lot to do with the timing.

While Americans are getting increasingly used to emergency alerts from local police and fire officials, on October 4 at 2:20 p.m. ET they’ll receive something a little different. “This is a test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed,” the alert should read. It will be sent to all consumer cell phones in either English or in Spanish, depending on the language settings of the wireless handset.

Harold Feld: “While getting the FCC to hold a hearing — let alone deny Fox29’s application for renewal — is certainly a long shot given how the FCC works, this is not a frivolous claim. To the contrary, it raises some very interesting questions from an FCC law perspective. So it is worth actually walking through the process here and what questions the FCC would need to resolve either to dismiss the petition to deny or to designate for a hearing. Because ultimately, unless the FCC finds a procedural deficiency, the FCC is going to have to actually write up a real and binding decision with real consequences and real precedential value.

The FCC released its annual pblic notice setting the deadline for paying annual regulatory fees.  Payments can be made via the FCC’s Commission Registration System (CORES) through 11:59 p.m. ET on Sept. 20. In addition to marking this deadline on their calendars, broadcasters should note with some satisfaction that despite the FCC’s overall budget increasing by more than $8 million, regulatory fees for broadcasters decreased by between 5% and 8%.

Fox Corp. is pointing to support from a handful of legislators as it pushes back on an effort to challenge its qualifications to hold TV station licenses. In a filing with the FCC, Fox sent four letters from U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), as well as Camden, New Jersey Mayor Victor G. Carstarphen and Pennsylvania State Rep. Anthony Bellmon (D-Philadelphia), all praising the public service of WTXF, Fox’s Philadelphia O&O whose license has been challenged.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the FCC announced that a nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System will take place on Oct. 4 at 2:20 p.m. ET. EAS participants, with limited exceptions, should have already filed their ETRS Form 1 providing the FCC with information about their stations’ EAS equipment. Any EAS participant that must update their ETRS Form 1 to ensure its accuracy must do so on or before Sept. 15.

Regulators invited public comment on whether the U.S. broadcast license for Fox Corp.’s TV station in Philadelphia should be renewed after a grassroots organization asked that it be denied, saying Fox knowingly broadcast false news about the 2020 election.

The challenge to Fox’s WTXF Philadelphia license is drawing a crowd, including founding president of Fox Broadcasting Jamie Kellner. Already this week Alfred Sikes, the Republican FCC chairman whose commission helped pave the way for the creation of a fourth network, registered his support for holding a hearing on Fox’s qualifications to be an FCC licensee. Now Kellner, along with former Democratic FCC Commissioner Ervin Duggan and ex-Fox News Channel commentator Bill Kristol, former editor of The Weekly Standard, have joined the chorus of Fox critics.

It has been more than one month since the Senate Commerce Committee favorably reported the nomination of Anna Gomez to fill the fifth, and vacant, seat on the FCC, but the Senate has teed up the nomination for a vote likely in September, said one observer who will welcome the Democratic majority.

Two House Republicans are urging the FCC to resist the urge to apply “1990s-era laws and regulations” to virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs). They argue, in part, that those Internet-delivered pay-TV services bring critical competition to the pay-TV sector and that Congress, not the FCC, has the authority to alter those rules, anyway. That warning arrived in an Aug. 9 letter to FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel from House Energy & Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Communications Subcommittee Chair Bob Latta (R-Ohio).

Following a recent workshop on the potential impact of AI on the communications sector, The FCC has voted to launch a Notice of Inquiry into non-federal spectrum usage and explore how new data sources, methods and technologies like AI would allow the agency to better manage increasingly congested commercial spectrum. This NOI will explore how new tools can promote effective spectrum management and identify new opportunities for innovation, the FCC said.

Fox is invoking the First Amendment in its opposition to a challenge to its character qualifications to hold an FCC broadcast license. The Media and Democracy Project (MAD), citing Fox’s settlement of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit over election misinformation, last month challenged the renewal of Fox’s WTFX Philadelphia, and by extension Fox’s character qualifications for holding any TV station licenses at all. According to a copy of its opposition to that challenge, filed with the FCC Wednesday (Aug. 2), Fox says MAD has failed to make a case that Fox’s license renewal should be denied and is treading dangerous ground.

Customers could be “troubled” to learn the actual price of their cable TV service if the FCC adopts a proposal that would require companies to disclose the flat price of service, ACA Connect says.

Why regulating streaming services like traditional pay TV providers would stifle inclusion efforts.

Ervin Duggan and William Kristol join effort challenging renewal application of Fox O&O WTXF Philadelphia.

Regulating streamers like old-school cable providers would ignore market realities and Congressional prerogatives, says former commissioner Michael O’Rielly.

Tanya Vea, president-COO of Bonneville International and a spokesperson for the new Coalition for Local News, explains why the group is drawing a direct line between the need for new FCC rules on dealing with vMVPDs and maintaining healthy local TV newsrooms. A full transcript of the conversation is included.

Several of the country’s biggest entertainment and streaming companies are teaming up to fight hundreds of local broadcasters over a years-old provision that would determine whether they are forced to negotiate directly with those local stations for distribution deals.  The Preserve Viewer Choice Coalition, which launched Wednesday, is made up of major entertainment companies and their broadcast networks, including Disney/ABC, Paramount/CBS, Fox Corp./Fox, NBCUniversal/NBC/Telemundo, Warner Bros. Discovery, Univision and Roku.

Executives with sports-centric streaming service Fubo met with officials at the FCC last week to express concern over a proposal to reclassify streaming cable TV replacements in a way that would require them to fundamentally change certain aspects of their business. Specifically, the proposal concerns whether to group virtual MVPD streaming services like Fubo as multichannel video programming distributors, or MVPDs, in the same ilk as traditional cable and satellite TV services like Comcast’s Xfinity, Charter’s Spectrum, Dish and DirecTV.

This week could prove to be a pivotal one for the FCC as efforts to bring to a vote the nomination of Anna Gomez hit overdrive. Supporters hope to have the Democrat confirmed before the Senate breaks for its month-long August recess at week-end. The decision will be up to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) who is also under pressure to get the 2024 military spending bill completed before lawmakers leave town.

The newly formed Coalition for Local News wants to convince the FCC that broadcasters must negotiate directly with vMVPDs to ensure their long-term fiscal viability. They’re smartly drawing a direct line between local TV news and democracy’s health to make their case.

The FCC has granted low-power WWOO-LD Westmoreland, N.H., special temporary authority to test 5G broadcasts. LPTV stations are looking to leapfrog the ATSC 3.0 standard’s data offload potential with what is being billed as “5G broadcasting.” “Anybody who has been frustrated in a crowded football stadium trying to watch the game on a phone can understand the value of sending out on-demand streams and data via broadcast,” Preston Padden, long-time industry executive and chief strategic officer of the LPTV Broadcasters Association, has said of the effort to turn LPTVs into turnkey 5G players.

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch undermined trust in American democracy with their reckless propagation of Trump’s Big Lie, but Fox’s O&Os shouldn’t be in the FCC’s crosshairs to pay for it, as a watchdog group would have it.

Armstrong Williams: “The FCC should recognize that broadcasters make significant capital investments when adopting new technologies and prioritize promoting broadcast innovations with the goal of both improving service to the public and the competitive viability of free-to-the-home broadcasting.”

If the long-established law behind the FCC character clause has any validity, it must be enforced against Fox Broadcasting where internal documents from the cable news side of the corporation shows that profit comes before truth or the national interest. Based solely on the facts and the law, Fox does not deserve a license to own a broadcast station.

A petition from the Media and Democracy Project (MAD) and former Fox executive Preston Padden asking the FCC to hold a hearing over and block a Fox-owned TV station’s license renewal isn’t likely to lead to agency action and would raise First Amendment concerns if it did, according to communications attorneys.

The Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled a vote next week on the nomination of Anna Gomez (left) for the open seat on the FCC, as well as the renominations of Democrat Geoffrey Starks (center) and Republican Brendan Carr (right) for their respective seats. The nomination markup will be July 12 at 10 a.m. If all goes well, the committee will favorably report the nominations to the full Senate for a vote, something that never happened for Gomez’s predecessor, Gigi Sohn, whose nomination was withdrawn after it was killed by Republicans, industry players and at least one Democrat who failed to support her.

Fargo, N.D.-based Forum Communications has learned the hard way just how much this FCC hates broadcast deals of any size.

The agency is being pushed on extending good-faith rules to OTT providers, making ISPs pay into Universal Service Fund. FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel has recently suggested that Congress may have to step in to give the FCC the regulatory authority that the Cable Acts of 1984 and 1992 gave it over traditional video. since those laws did not apply to, or anticipate, OTT. But she has apparently not ruled it out. “We are carefully reviewing the issue and exploring our options,” said an FCC spokesperson.

Testifying at her first nomination hearing on Thursday, longtime telecommunications lawyer Anna Gomez faced little of the partisan sparring that marked prior nominee Gigi Sohn’s appearances.