Kohl to FCC: Tighten Program-Access Rules

Sen Herb Kohl (D-WI) has written Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to let him know the chairman of the Senate Antitrust Committee wants the FCC to toughen up its program-access rules to make sure that independent programmers don't get squeezed out of the marketplace. Chairman Kohl would like the FCC to set a "prompt and reasonable" deadline for responding to program-access complaints; to come up with a better definition of what constitutes discrimination in carriage disputes; to prevent multichannel-video providers from moving channels to a "disfavored or costly" tier during disputes, and anything else it might need to do. Sen Kohl also asked the FCC to adopt rules to prevent program tying that disfavors independent programmers.
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