Chairman Wheeler Defends Navigation Device Proposal

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler spent some of his time at a House Appropriations Committee hearing March 15 defending his navigation device proposal as providing consumers access to their own data and not, as cable operators have suggested, handing over cable programming to third parties to do with what they will, including riding roughshod over copyrights and monetizing content without compensation.

Rep Kevin Yoder (R-KS) asked what problem the FCC was trying to solve in its proposal, which is to make cable set-top box data, including programming streams, available for third-party boxes for apps. Commissioner Ajit Pai, who joined Chairman Wheeler at the witness table in the budget hearing, had first crack. He said the problem with the navigation device market, to the degree there is one, has been that the FCC has had a "highly intrusive set of regulations to create the marketplace it wanted." He said the Amazon Echo could be the navigation device of the future and that did not dovetail with "backward-looking technological mandates." Rep Yoder said he did not understand how imposing a new technological mandate benefitted industry or consumers, especially given that apps are the future, and programming was already being accessed via apps. Chairman Wheeler said he agreed the world was going to software and apps. But he said Commissioner Pai was wrong to suggest that Echo could be the next navigation device. He said that wasn't possible: "Because the cable operators won't give the information that would be necessary for an Echo to operate, and therein lies the rub." He said Congress had provided a "clear-cut, black-letter" mandate that there be access to competitive navigation devices, and that there had not been for 20 the last years. He said technology makes that possible.