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 [...]
By By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-16-18 With the help of three Republicans, the Senate has voted by a slim margin to nullify the FCC's effort to deregulate internet access, but it still faces an up-Hill battle that most observers believe will ultimately not be won. The vote on the Congressional Review Act [...]
By InsideRadio.com, 5-15-18 The Dept. of Justice’s list of which consent decrees to target for possible elimination continues to include the decades-old agreements covering how radio licenses music from ASCAP and BMI. Not only would such a move potentially upend how radio secures music rights, it would be “extraordinarily disruptive” to the entire music marketplace [...]
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable Online, 5-10-18 The FCC has hitched enforcement of network neutrality, primarily by the Federal Trade Commission, to the promises and business plans ISPs outlined in new reporting requirements the OMB approved May 2, at least for a period of three years. According to a Federal Register notice being published Friday (May 11), [...]