By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 6-25-18 Network neutrality activists have been playing up doom-and-gloom scenarios of internet service providers blocking, throttling or engaging in paid prioritization with impunity, now that FCC rules against those practices are gone. But the matter is not quite so black and white, or in this case black and [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 6-21-18 The FCC is tentatively proposing to eliminate a number of children's TV rules, and seeks comment on changing others, tentatively concluding that educational and informational programming does not have to be at least a half-hour in length and regularly scheduled. The agency also proposes cutting the frequency [...]
By Robert Barnes, washingtonpost.com, 6-14-18 The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down Minnesota’s ban on wearing “political” apparel to polling places, saying that the state’s intentions may be good but that its law was too broad and open to differing interpretations. The 7-to-2 decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was careful not [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 6-12-18 A federal district court has ruled that AT&T and Time Warner can get together, making the Trump administration's Justice Department the loser in the high-profile legal case. That came in a highly anticipated announcement by D.C. District Court Judge Richard Leon, who had signaled weeks ago that [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 6-11-18 As activists talking web doom and gloom pushed for a congressional rollback of the FCC's network neutrality rule deregulation taking effect Monday, fans of the FCC move were weighing in, including calling for Congress to step in to create new rules not based in Title II common [...]
By Ann E. Marimow, washingtonpost.com, 5-30-18 Advertisements promoting the American Civil Liberties Union’s upcoming national conference in Washington, D.C., will not appear at Metro stations or on buses, after a federal judge refused Wednesday to force the D.C. regional transit agency to accept the ads. The decision from U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan upholds [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-25-18 Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr signaled this week he thought reports of the impending death of the internet were highly overrated. In an interview for C-SPAN's Communicators series, Carr said that on June 11, when the FCC's network neutrality regulation rollback takes effect, consumers "are not going [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-24-18 The House has overwhelmingly (351 to 66) passed the massive defense appropriations bill HR 5515, the National Defense Authorization Act for 2019, a bill that includes a data privacy win for tech companies. In a late-edition amendment, the Email Privacy Act was adopted by voice vote Thursday [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-24-18 Facebook is continuing to try to address the issues around fake news that have put it in the spotlight in Washington, including threats that if it did not do something about being used as a misinformation tool by foreign actors and others, Congress would. That threat came [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, and other reports, 5-23-18 A U.S. district court judge in Manhattan has ruled that if a Twitter account is used by a government official, then it constitutes a public forum subject to First Amendment protections. The Knight First Amendment at Columbia University had filed suit in the Southern [...]