Senate not planning communications law overhaul

The Senate won’t be following the House’s lead to overhaul the sweeping law regulating the TV, radio and other communications services, which has not been updated since the rapid growth of the Internet.

The House Commerce Committee has begun to probe ways to bring the Communications Act into the 21st Century, but Sen Mark Pryor (D-AK) said that the Senate Commerce Committee, of which he is a member, probably won’t be following suit in 2014. “I doubt we’ll do anything this year but I know that the House has been saying that they want to open that and certainly we’ll be seeing what they want to do,” said Sen Pryor, chairman of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on Communications, at a winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners in Washington.