By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 2-16-17 Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force, has released what the task force billed as an Innovation Agenda for the new Congress and it backs a free an open internet: Free of burdensome government regs and open for business. In the section [...]

By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 2-16-17 Ajit Pai gave his first TV interview as chairman of the FCC to Fox Business Network and said he would investigate indecency complaints against CBS, NBC or anyone else if they were presented to him. Pai appeared Thursday on the 2 p.m. hour of The Intelligence Report [...]

By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 2-9-17 To establish a baseline for a promised flood of network neutrality comments to the FCC, as of Thursday, the proceeding was listed as the third most active proceeding in terms of comments with 178 comments in the past 30 days. Universal Service Fund comments and Lifeline subsidy [...]

By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 2-8-17 FCC chairman Ajit Pai says the Enforcement Bureau will no longer get to sign off on consent decrees settling proposed forfeitures without the commissioners voting on them. That was the latest in a series of process reforms the new chairman is implementing in his first few weeks [...]

By Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, 8-15-16 After nearly eight years of aiding and abetting Obama, leftists now fear the possible constitutional overreach of our next president. Peter Beinart writes angrily in The Atlantic of the supposed Trump intellectuals, apparently on the premise of not whether one has endorsed formally the Trump candidacy, but [...]

By Brad Smith, President and Chief Legal Officer, Microsoft, 7-14-16 Today the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in a case brought by Microsoft addressing the global application of U.S. search warrants for people’s email. The court ruled in favor of Microsoft overturning an earlier ruling from a lower court. We [...]

By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 7-12-16 An FCC source confirms the FCC's Dmeocratic majority has voted to approve the FCC's quadrennial media ownership review notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM). House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) had said at an FCC oversight hearing Tuesday (July 12) that he had been told that [...]

By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 7-12-16 As expected, the FCC's set-top proposal got a lot of attention at the House Communications Subcommittee FCC oversight hearing Tuesday. Among the takeaways were that the U.S. Copyright Office is concerned about the proposal, and FCC chairman Tom wheeler is committed to working with the office to [...]

By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 6-14-16 In a big and sweeping victory for the FCC, the Obama Administration and FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has let stand the FCC's new Open Internet order. That includes the definition of Internet service [...]

By Des Bieler, washingtonpost.com, 4-26-16 The Washington Redskins have asked the Supreme Court to review their appeal of a federal judge’s July ruling that upheld the cancellation of their trademark. But there’s a catch: the team only wants the high court to consider its case if it takes up a similar one involving a band [...]