John Eggerton

In staffing his Federal Communications Commission transition team, President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a pair of American Enterprise Institute (AEI) veterans and free market de-regulators in Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison.

While it is tough to predict whether the merger-threatening populist Donald Trump (he has said he opposes AT&T-Time Warner and would unwind Comcast-NBCU) or the regulation-threatening Trump (he wants two regulations axed for each new one added) will set the tone for the FCC, the choice of the transition team leadership could be instructive. Eisenach and Jamison are linked at the communications deregulatory hip by AEI, a free market think tank. While Eisenach has gotten attention as a key overall transition team member for his deregulatory views, including on network neutrality, Jamison's appointment adds some new deregulatory punch. "Regulation is about disappointing people at a rate that they can endure," Jamison has written. But he is clearly out to "disappoint" people less. Jamison says most of the reasons for having an FCC have "gone away," in part because he says there are few telecom network monopolies, and ISPs are rarely among those few. That is quite the difference from the Wheeler FCC's emphasis on ISP gatekeepers to justify various regulatory approaches, including net neutrality and broadband privacy rules, both of which are likely to get a second look under a Republican chair.

Kim Hart, press secretary to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, is exiting to join a new unnamed and unlaunched media venture from Politico cofounders Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz.

She will start Dec. 5 as technology editor. Chairman Wheeler has not said when he is exiting, but it is expected to be by Jan. 20, when a new President is sworn in. Hart's last day is Dec. 2. Hart joined the FCC in 2014 from Neustar, where she had been head of media relations. Hart is a former reporter and editor with Politico (she left in 2012), so it will be a reunion with her former boss.

President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence met Nov 20 with BET founder Bob Johnson, currently the head of RLJ Entertainment, an over-the-top video company. It was not clear whether President-elect Trump is considering him for a position in the Administration or was simply seeking guidance and input.

Johnson is a fan of the Federal Communications Commission set-top revamp plan, which Republicans on the Hill have warned the FCC not to vote on during the transition to a Trump Administration. Johnson, who became a billionaire when he agreed to sell Black Entertainment Television (BET) to Viacom in 2000, has said that just as BET would not have existed had cable not "broken the broadcast monopoly," new over-the-top offerings, like his own, will not be able to flourish unless the FCC eliminates cable's "stranglehold" on set-top boxes.

President-elect Donald Trump still doesn't like being lampooned by Saturday Night Live, even suggesting he should get "equal time" although he is no longer a candidate and would not qualify for it.

Following the latest Saturday Night Live broadcast (Nov. 19), the first post-election appearance of Alex Baldwin in his wicked impression of the now President-elect, Trump Tweeted: "I watched parts of @nbcsnl Saturday Night Live last night. It is a totally one-sided, biased show - nothing funny at all. Equal time for us?" The "equal time for us" reference in the SNL Tweet would appear to be to the Federal Communications Commission's equal time (technically "equal opportunities") rule, which requires that local stations (and radio stations and cable outlets) that provide nonnews airtime to qualified federal candidates have to give other candidates an equal opportunity for equivalent airtime.

Sens Ed Markey (D-MA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) have lifted their holds on the re-nomination of Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to a second term on the Federal Communications Commission. Sen Markey's office had cited his questioning of the commissioner's commitment to consumers and competition, tied to her perceived issues with the set-top box proposal Sen Markey had helped prompt the FCC to propose. Sen Markey's office confirmed that the hold had been lifted, and apparently the senator had positive conversations with Commissioner Rosenworcel and what they called a commitment to proceeding on remaining items before the commission. If so, and if that included the set-top proposal, it would fly in the face of Republican warnings about voting any controversial items still before the commission.

A recently passed House bill would make it easy for Congress to invalidate any last-minute regulations from an agency like the Federal Communications Commission or Federal Trade Commission with a single vote. The House on Nov 17 passed (240 to 179) a bill, the Midnight Rules Relief Act (HR 5982), to backstop those warnings to all federal agencies about 11th-hour votes, on or off a public meeting. The bill can't get a Senate vote until at least Nov. 28 since the Senate is not holding any business sessions until that date given the Thanksgiving holiday.

The bill "amends the Congressional Review Act to allow Congress to consider a joint resolution to disapprove multiple regulations that federal agencies have submitted for congressional review within the last 60 legislative days of a session of Congress during the final year of a President's term. Congress may disapprove a group of such regulations together (i.e., 'en bloc') instead of the current procedure of considering only one regulation at a time." The bill would apply to the FCC and FTC, according to a spokesperson for Rep Darrell Issa (R-CA) who introduced the bill, as well as federal agencies like the Department of Agriculture, FDA and EPA. If passed by the Senate, it would have to wait until President-elect Donald Trump was sworn in to be submitted for a presidential signature since the current President has already signaled it would be vetoed. The Executive Office of the President said the "arbitrary packaging of rules for an up-or-down vote, as this bill does, is unnecessary."

Having already branded President-elect Donald Trump a threat to press freedom and journalist safety, the Committee to Protect Journalists has asked for a meeting with Vice President-elect Mike Pence to talk about the Administration's commitment to freedom of the press. They were writing to him in his capacity as head of the transition team, looking for help in correcting the "terrible example" the Trump campaign's treatment of journalists has set, a precedent of vilification that fuels attacks on press freedom, they argue.

In a letter to Vice President-elect Pence Nov. 17, CPJ executive director Joel Simon said he wanted to remind incoming officials about the "danger" that harassment of the press in the US -- President-elect Trump has criticized media broadly as in a conspiracy against him, insulted journalists specifically, and threatened lawsuits and tightening libel laws -- could be used as a "pretext" by others around the world to "persecute their critics."

The Federal Communications Commission has rejected a pair of broadcasters' complaints against a company delivering TV stations to college students but says it could refocus their complaint at DirecTV if they still have a bone to pick.

The owners of WSEE and WICU, Erie (PA) had complained that Campus Televideo (CTV) has been retransmitting their signals to Edinboro University without either retransmission consent or a right of subdistribution. The FCC's Media Bureau dismissed the complaint on the grounds that Campus Televideo was acting as an agent of DirecTV—AT&T told the FCC that CTA "is an authorized sales agent for DIRECTV’s programming services, and that DIRECTV directly provides the programming services including the Stations to Edinboro University," according to the bureau. The FCC pointed out that DirecTV has to pay SJL license fees related to commercial customers per their retrans deal. The stations said that some of the stations being made available to students violated network nonduplication rules, but CTV countered that that was between DirecTV and the stations, not the university or CTV. The FCC agreed.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says he has not decided his departure date. That came in a press conference following an abbreviated FCC meeting—the business took about a minute—following the dropping of virtually all the agenda items after Republicans asked him to stand down from "controversial" votes. Chairman Wheeler would not say whether he would stay on, as a commissioner, past when a new chairman was named to make the commission 2-2 until a successor were confirmed for Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel if she is not reconfirmed in the lame duck Congress and has to leave at the end of December.

Some telecommunication providers are asking the Trump Administration to pivot from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal on re-regulating incumbent and competitive business data service (BDS) providers. BDS (formerly “special access”) is business, rather than customer-facing, broadband data services and includes credit card readers, ATMs and wireless backhaul.

Chairman Wheeler pulled a vote on that proposal from the Nov. 17 meeting and is not expected to get traction anytime soon, but the Invest in Broadband for America coalition—CenturyLink, Cincinnati Bell, Consolidated Communications, FairPoint and Frontier Communications—wasn't taking any chances. “The FCC did the right thing by not pushing this proposal through before the next administration takes office,” said Kathleen Abernathy, executive VP of external affairs for Frontier Communications and herself a former FCC commissioner. “Any proposed increased regulation of the competitive BDS market could have huge impacts on broadband investment and, as a result, on economic growth and jobs all across the country.”