By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-14-20 Dave Grimaldi, former chief of staff to Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn and senior counsel to her father, House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), heads up advocacy before Congress and federal agencies for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents some of the largest publishers and platforms in [...]
By Gary Arlen, Multichannel News, 9-9-20 From its aggressive 5G deployment plan and a proposal to eliminate cable TV administrative paperwork – with additional action on robocalls, foreign ownership and IP calling services - the Federal Communications Commission intends to cover a lot of turf at its Sept. 30 monthly Open Meeting. The agenda, [...]
By Daniel Frankel, Multichannel News, 9-4-20 The price for extracting from U.S. networks equipment and software from Chinese vendors deemed security threats by the Trump Administration will come in at around $1.8 billion, according to figures released Friday by the FCC. The agency also said that most of that money, $1.6 billion of it, [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-3-20 The Justice Department could file an antitrust suit against Google (and YouTube) parent Alphabet as soon as this month, according to The New York Times. Google's market power and position as the dominant search engine have drawn record fines in Europe, but it has pretty much avoided similar [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-3-20 Using terms like "disastrous," "dangerous" and "unworkable," the Consumer Technology Association told the FCC Sept. 2 to reject the Trump Administration petition to regulate social media via reformation of Sec. 230. That is the law that provides internet platforms with immunity from civil liability for most of the [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-3-20 Facebook, which has taken flak in D.C. over the use of its platform for 2016 Russian election disinformation, said it won't accept any new political ads for a week before the upcoming election, though ads running before that time can continue to run. That is one of what [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 9-1-20 Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) has introduced a bill, the Broadcast Diversity in Leadership Act, to promote broadcast diversity by creating the incubator program the FCC tried to create as part of its broadcast dereg order that was remanded by a federal appeals court. The difference is that [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 9-1-20 Broadcasters are arguing that the FCC does not need to have statistics on how repealing or modifying its broadcast ownership rules impact media diversity to make those changes. The National Association of Broadcasters is arguing that point in a brief to the Supreme Court filed Thursday (Aug. [...]
By John Eggerton, Multichannel News, 9-1-20 Broadcasters are hitting back hard on critics of the FCC's proposal to facilitate TV station's flexible use of their new ATSC 3.0 broadcast transmission standard to become a broadband as well as broadcast player, saying efforts to impose new regs, or exhume old ones, are cynical and unnecessary. [...]
By Gary Arlen, Multichannel News, 8-25-20 In what could be a preview of Biden administration technology policy, three former Democratic policymakers are recommending the creation of a new independent federal regulatory agency - the Digital Platform Agency (DPA) - to oversee Big Tech’s expanding presence in American business and life. The agency would focus [...]