Regulation

The NCAA says certain benefits could lead to a bidding war for players’ services, upending the collegiate model. Reformists say that’s the point.

Dominion Voting Systems is adding a new team of lawyers as it prepares for its current lawsuits — and another potential round. Cable networks Newsmax and One American News Network, which aired post election conspiracy theories, are among the top targets for Dominion’s next round of lawsuits, according to two people familiar with the matter.

It may be a new, Democratic-led FCC, but broadcasters and cable operators are fighting the same retrans and media ownership battles. On March 16, representatives of the American Television Alliance met with a top FCC staffer to argue that the current media ownership rules allow broadcasters to skirt limits and create triopolies and even quadropolies, loopholes they argued should be eliminated. Only a few days later, representatives of the NAB met with a different FCC staffer to talk about the same issues, but from quite a different perspective.

Judge Judy has brought down the gavel on her own $22 million countersuit against talent agent Richard Lawrence and Rebel Entertainment Partners, and it’s because of CBS.

Dominion Voting Systems claims the cable news giant falsely claimed in an effort to boost faltering ratings that the voting company had rigged the 2020 election.

J. Michael Luttig: “Federal appeals court judge Laurence H. Silberman’s dangerous dissenting opinion in Tah v. Global Witness Publishing last week has already caused a firestorm — not because he urged the Supreme Court to overrule New York Times v. Sullivan and its “actual malice” defamation standard, but because of the astonishing and disturbing reasons that he proposed for dispensing with that landmark decision.”

The Federal Trade Commission which has historically worked its will through lawsuits and settlements, is flexing its rulemaking muscle. That is because acting FTC Chair Rebecca Kelly Slaughter has created a rulemaking group within the Office of General Counsel. Historically, the FTC has used its rulemaking authority primarily to review existing rules, rather than come up with new ones, but that could be about to change.

James Hohmann: “A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers — led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and ranking Republican member Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) — introduced legislation last week that would require the Supreme Court to start televising its proceedings. As they filed their bill, freshman Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) read aloud to reporters from a Dr. Seuss book — a publicity stunt that also felt like a foreboding omen. It’s not that justices and attorneys would be reduced to antics like Marshall’s if cameras arrived. But they would inevitably act differently, in ways that could prove detrimental to the pursuit of justice.”

The chief executives of Twitter, Alphabet and Facebook (l-r: Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg) will appear before a House panel, where they will face questions about social media’s role in fomenting discord and their decisions to suspend or ban former President Trump.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has named Ben Arden to be his chief of staff. Arden had been a legal adviser to Carr since 2019. Arden was previously associate chief of the Media Bureau’s Video Division. Before joining the FCC in 2010, Arden was a communications attorney at Williams Mullen in D.C.

A fast-advancing Florida privacy bill that would give consumers the right to opt out of targeted advertising is drawing opposition from the ad industry. The Consumer Data Privacy Bill, first unveiled in February, would broadly require companies to notify consumers about data collection, and allow consumers to opt out of the sale of their personal data, as well as its processing for purposes of targeted ads.

The embattled Hollywood Foreign Press Association gets a judge to dismiss a suit brought by a Norwegian entertainment reporter — this time for good.

Siding with YouTube, the Biden administration is urging a federal judge to reject an attempt by video creators to invalidate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The administration’s move comes in a lawsuit by Kimberly Carleste Newman and other content creators who say YouTube wrongly restricted and de-monetized videos with titles like “black lives matter,” “racism,” and “white supremacy.”

As expected, President Joe Biden said he will nominate antitrust expert Lina Khan to serve on the Federal Trade Commission. Khan, a professor at Columbia Law School, is among the most prominent critics of Big Tech. In 2017, while still a law student, Khan argued in the Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” that antitrust policies should aim to preserve a “competitive process and market structure,” as opposed to just focusing on whether a company’s practices harm consumers in the short term.

He is promoted from executive vice president and chief litigation counsel to oversee the company’s legal activities. In addition, Nicholas Trutanich joins fox as executive vice president and chief ethics and compliance officer.

Tech companies led by Mozilla are urging the FCC to swiftly reinstate net neutrality rules stripped away under the Trump administration. In a letter to FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on Friday, ADT, Dropbox, Eventbrite, Reddit, Vimeo and Wikimedia joined Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, in calling net neutrality “critical for preserving the internet as a free and open medium that promotes innovation and spurs economic growth.”

A senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that liberal media bias — “nearly all television — network and cable — is a Democratic Party trumpet,” for example — has resulted in such abuse of the landmark Times v. Sullivan requirement that speech relating to public officials has to show actual malice to be actionably defamatory that the longstanding precedent should be overturned.

NAB President Gordon Smith says the organization is shifting into offense with the new Democrat-led FCC, pairing with newspaper publishers for an antitrust exemption in dealing with Big Tech along with pressing for a relaxation of antiquated TV ownership rules. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

A bipartisan group of senators is looking to bring the Supreme Court to television, aiming to have the high court reach a new technological frontier after nearly a year of hearing arguments via teleconference due to the coronavirus pandemic. Senate Majority Whip and Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin and Sen. Chuck Grassley, the committee’s top Republican, introduced a bill on March 18 that would require the Supreme Court to allow public court proceedings to be televised.

Advocates for video accessibility for the deaf and blind communities want the FCC to seriously consider how to apply captioning and audio description mandates to video streamers.
That came in meetings earlier this month between acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and groups including the National Association of the Deaf and the American Foundation for the Blind, according to a document filed with the FCC.

A claim that the company illegally prohibits employees from discussing pay has been added to a lawsuit accusing it of paying women less than men. Disney has aggressively pushed back.

The FCC has voted unanimously on how to open up a swath of high-value midband spectrum in the 3.45 GHz band — currently used by DOD for key radar applications — for commercial wireless broadband (5G) and, separately, approved proposed application and bidding processes for the auction (auction 110) of that 100 MHz. It is seeking comment on those auction processes.

Last week, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau issued an advisory reminding broadcasters about their obligation to provide sponsorship identification information to their audiences whenever they receive something of value in exchange for airing any programming. It also highlighted two other issues: (1) that broadcasters have an obligation to exercise reasonable diligence to make sure that any third-party program providers also include sponsorship identification when they are paid to include material in programs that they provide to the station and (2) the FCC can impose substantial fines on stations that do not live up to these obligations.

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz and Republican Sen. John Thune on Wednesday rolled out a bipartisan bill that would increase “accountability” for Big Tech companies and enhance transparency regarding content moderation for users, in an effort to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The bill, titled the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act and also known as the “PACT Act,” would preserve the benefits of Section 230 — a rule that shields social media companies from being held liable for content on their platforms while allowing them to moderate that content — while making “significant reforms” to protect Americans using the platforms.

Connecticut is the latest state to take aim at the big pockets of Big Tech with a proposed digital ad tax, and it is not sitting well with advertisers. The Association of National Advertisers has come out strongly against SB 821, a bill that would levy a 10% tax on digital ad services in the state on any business with annual gross revenues (worldwide) of more than $10 billion.