Regulation

Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has assembled her team after getting the nod for the interim (at least) post last week. She had been widely expected to get the acting chair post so there was plenty of time to ponder the acting staff she has lined up.

Facebook and Amazon topped all other U.S. companies in federal lobbying expenditures last year, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the most recent disclosures. It was the second straight year they outspent all other companies, including stalwarts such as AT&T and Boeing.

President Biden on Thursday appointed Rebecca Kelly Slaughter acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission and Jessica Rosenworcel as acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. The two appointments reflect the tectonic political shift underway in Washington as Democrats, newly in charge of the White House and Congress, prepare to roll back a slew of deregulatory actions implemented under President Donald Trump.

Google today threatened to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government goes ahead with plans to make tech giants pay for news content. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison quickly hit back, saying “we don’t respond to threats.” Above, Mel Silva (r), the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, appears via a video link during a Senate inquiry into a mandatory code of conduct proposed by the government at Parliament House in Canberra, Friday, Jan. 22. (Mick Tsikas/AAP Image via AP)

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said she wasn’t dismissing Parler’s “substantive underlying claims” against Amazon, but said it had fallen short in demonstrating the need for an injunction forcing it back online. Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting service on Jan. 11. In court filings, it said the suspension was a “last resort” to block Parler from harboring violent plans to disrupt the presidential transition.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is tapped by President Biden to lead the agency.

Michael Pack resigned as the chief executive office of the U.S. Agency for Global Media just minutes after President Joe Biden was inaugurated on Wednesday. The agency runs the Voice of America and sister networks. Pack had created a furor when he took over the agency last year and fired the boards of all the outlets under his control along with the leadership of the individual broadcast networks. The actions were criticized as threatening the broadcasters’ prized editorial independence.

Department of Justice Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim said that if the government does not find a way to harness the massive market power of those platforms to democratic policies, the country risks “devastating outcomes for our civil democratic society.” He suggested one solution could be a new “public-private” agency, the Digital Markets Rulemaking Board, with the power to regulate edge providers like social media sites.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joe Simons will exit the agency on Jan. 29. Simons, an antitrust lawyer, has led the agency since May 2018. News of Simons’ departure comes as the FTC is in the process of conducting a broad review of what it calls “dangerously opaque” privacy practices in the online ad industry.

Disney is asking a Los Angeles judge to dismiss a sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation complaint from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing for being “hopelessly vague” about which Criminal Minds workers it’s suing on behalf of.

Nathan Simington got the unexpected nod from President Donald Trump last fall to join the FCC, a nomination he said he was surprised to receive but is clearly determined to make the most of. the former NTIA official talks about his road from rural (and urban) Saskatchewan to a seat on the FCC, outlines his regulatory philosophy, pushes back on criticism from Hill Democrats and explains his take on the hot-button debate over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the legal provision that protects social media platforms from liability for what their users post.

C-SPAN will air/stream the Supreme Court oral argument today (Jan. 19) in FCC v. Prometheus. That is the FCC’s defense of its 2017 broadcast ownership deregulation decision. The argument is scheduled for 10 a.m.

Citing discussions on social media media of using alternatives to social media platforms for “coordinating future activities,” the FCC Sunday (Jan. 17) warned about using any of those communications alternatives to commit or facilitate any criminal acts. The warning came from the Enforcement Bureau in advance of Wednesday’s Inauguration of Joe Biden as president and chatter about violence nationwide by Trump supporters.

Simmering tensions between journalists and managers at Voice of America grew into open rebellion Thursday, with more than two dozen newsroom employees signing a petition demanding the immediate resignation of their new director and his top deputy.

The National Association of Broadcasters joined in a letter from a coalition of news organizations to federal law enforcement agencies Thursday, saying they wanted more information about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as well as the potential for further violence around the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

In response to a question on his last press call, outgoing FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he has some issues with the permanent bans on President Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, adding that he recognized the country was going through difficult times “and these are difficult questions to confront.”

NAB President Gordon Smith: “The work of the press to keep the American public informed during these dark times has been admirable, valuable and — because of an unacceptable and alarming lack of information provided by law enforcement officials — necessary. It is imperative that law enforcement not only address the American people about the possibility of danger in the days ahead, but also provide security briefings to news media to help keep journalists safe while reporting from the field.”

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who is widely expected to be named acting FCC chair next week — and perhaps more than acting — used a portion of her statement on the FCC’s first meeting of the new year and last meeting for chairman Ajit Pai to talk a little about the recent violence at the Capitol from the vantage of someone who frequented its halls as a top staffer.

Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and a baker’s dozen of Democratic members of the California congressional delegation have called on attorney general nominee Merrick Garland to make net neutrality one of his first orders of business in the new post. Garland has been a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which has principle oversight of FCC decisions like the elimination of net neutrality rules.

Frontier has told the FCC that its beef with Gray Television is over the value of the TV signal and that Gray’s retransmission consent complaint against Frontier “lacks any basis in fact or law.” Gray formally complained to the FCC that Frontier was not negotiating in good faith and did not give is customers “as soon as possible” notice of a potential blackout, both of which are required under FCC rules.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who is exiting the commission Jan. 20, said his reforms of the agency since taking over in 2017 have fundamentally changed the FCC for the better. In a virtual address to the Free State Foundation, Pai took something of a victory lap, outlining the ways he thought his process reforms had made the agency more transparent and effective, by clearing out the regulatory underbrush, a pledge he made early on.

Broadcasters are telling the Supreme Court that a lower court’s rejection of the FCC’s broadcast dereg decision was a recipe for “judicial intervention run riot” and that diversity alone cannot be invoked to block deregulation of rules that marketplace changes have rendered unsupportable and no longer necessary in the public interest.

The Copyright Royalty Board today published a Federal Register notice announcing that SoundExchange was auditing a number of broadcasters and other webcasters to assess their compliance with the statutory music licenses provided by Sections 112 and 114 of the Copyright Act for the public performance of sound recordings and ephemeral copies made in the digital transmission process by commercial webcasters.

President Donald Trump has prepared a sweeping list of individuals he’s hoping to pardon in the final days of his administration that includes senior White House officials, family members, prominent rappers — and possibly himself, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump is hoping to announce the pardons on Jan. 19 — his final full day in office — and his ideas are currently being vetted by senior advisers and the White House counsel’s office, the people said.