Broadcasting&Cable

President Donald Trump took issue with the speed of broadband buildouts to rural American and to anchor institutions, calling it an "intolerable" situation, though suggesting as with many other things that it was a problem he had inherited. In the President's Economic Report to the Congress released Feb 21, he suggested the broadband ball had been dropped on prior watches. "President Clinton promised to connect 'every classroom, every library, and every hospital in America,' to the Internet by 2000," he wrote. "Decades later, 39% of rural Americans still lack high-speed broadband.

Sinclair has submitted its new proposal to purchase Tribune stations, taking into account the deregulatory media ownership changes the Federal Communications Commission made in December 2018 to allow for more local station ownership, including allowing smaller-market duopolies and the ownership of more than one top station in a market in some circumstances.  The plan includes divestitures of WGN-TV Chicago (IL) and WPIX-TV New York, and KSWB-TV San Diego (CA) to come under the FCC's 39 percent ownership cap. Sinclair does not own stations in either New York or Chicago.

The Federal Communications Commission is getting major pushback on its vote to revamp the Lifeline communications subsidy program. Over 200 organizations, including the ACLU, American Library Association, the Benton Foundation and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, have written FCC Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to reject his own proposal. Initial comments were due Feb. 21, with reply comments due in March.

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to eliminate the requirement that broadcasters and cable operators keep paper copies of the FCC's regulations on hand, the latest in a series of actions to whack away at regulations FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has said are part of a regulatory underbrush allowed to grow for too long. A vote was scheduled for the Feb 22 FCC meeting, but was voted on circulation Feb 20 and removed from the agenda for the meeting. The FCC gave the National Association of Broadcasters some love in the release announcing the adoption of the change.

Thursday, Feb 22, will be the red letter day for court and congressional challenges to the Federal Communications Commission's Dec 14 decision to roll back network neutrality rules and reclassify Internet service providers out from under Title II common carrier regulations. The FCC Has delivered the final Restoring Internet Freedom order to the Federal Register, which has just signaled it would be publishing that order on Feb 22. That means the repeal will take place on or about April 23. But the lawsuits to overturn the repeal can get started in Feb or in early March.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants a report by June on the best way for Department of Justice to confront the cybersecurity threats from terrorists, criminals and enemy governments, with efforts to interfere with elections a top priority. Top intelligence and law enforcement officials, including from the DOJ, told a congressional hearing panel recently that Russia will almost certainly try to interfere with the midterms, as they did the 2016 presidential elections, and that the country was not adequately prepared to combat the threat.

The White House, backed by the Federal Communications Commission, is once again seeking to impose a new fee on communications providers that would amount to billions of dollars. That is according to the FCC's FY 2019 budget, released this week as part of the Administration's overall budget proposal.