The weeks in between Thanksgiving and the end of the year were "unseasonably" busy in 2007. Despite cautions from Members of Congress and outcries from the public, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) charged ahead with changes to media ownership rules. And, despite President Bush's 2004 goal of universal, affordable broadband by 2007, the year closed with many still unconnected and without a national strategy to connect everyone to high-speed Internet access.
I. FCC Changes Media Ownership Rules
On December 18, the FCC overturned a 32-year-old ban that prevented the common ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same community. When considering newspaper combinations with television and radio stations in the future, the FCC will presume that newspaper-broadcast TV combinations in the top 20 U.S. markets are in the public interest so long as eight independent voices, including newspapers, remain and the stations are not among the top four in the market. The Commission will also allow newspaper-radio combinations but require no voices test. Newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership would also be presumed to be in the public interest in markets smaller than the top 20 so long as at least seven hours of local news is added to a station that did not do it before, or if the station or newspaper is in financial distress.
The FCC decision came despite a bill approved unanimously by the Senate Commerce Committee aimed at prevent the FCC from voting specifically on the cross-ownership item by requiring the commission, generally, to publish any proposed rule changes in the Federal Register 90 days prior to a vote, giving the public 60 days to comment and another 30 days for reply comments. A companion bill was later introduced in the House and modified to "apply to any attempt by the commission to modify, revise, or amend its regulations related to broadcast and newspaper ownership made after Oct. 1, 2007."
The vote also came after a Senate Commerce Committee FCC oversight hearing at which a number of senators asked the FCC to delay the vote. At that hearing, Sen Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri)warned FCC Chairman Kevin Martin that if he moved forward with the Dec 18 vote, "you are a braver man than I am."
- Track the Senate bill
- Track the House bill House bill
At the same FCC meeting in December, the Commission adopted 12 proposals aimed at improving minority media ownership and asked for public comment on 13 additional proposals to do the same. Although the broadcasting industry is 98 years old and uses billions of dollars worth of publicly owned spectrum, minorities own only 8% of the nation's full power commercial radio stations and 3% of the full power commercial television stations. See an analysis of the FCC decision.
II. Missing Bush's Broadband Goal
In early December, Reuters reported that 7 in 10 homes in the Netherlands has a broadband Internet connection. In contrast, BusinessWeek's Tom Lowry noted that FCC Chairman Martin could have taken a much larger role in helping the U.S. catch up with other countries when it comes to the all-important issue of broadband access. In the US, broadband penetration hovers around 50%. And the U.S. has fallen further behind in global broadband. The latest rankings by the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development show the U.S. at 15 in terms of broadband penetration—down from 4 in 2000. Average speeds in Japan are 20 times faster than in the U.S., and South Koreans pay nine times less per megabit than Americans do. Lowry wrote that Chairman Martin should have started regularly collecting accurate data about penetration; speeds; and which communities, minority and rural, for example, lack affordable services.
On the eve of Bush's missed national broadband goal, the Benton Foundation released Universal Affordable Broadband for All Americans, a report and roadmap for making broadband access as universal as telephones are today. The report calls for an aggressive new approach, a national broadband strategy, and efforts to modernize federal universal telephone service policies to help meet the challenges of connecting all Americans to broadband.