The New York Public Service Commission's order to revoke it's approval for Charter's acquisition of Time Warner Cable envisions Charter coming up with a plan for its own replacement. The company has 60 days to file an action plan, telling the commission how, exactly, it will ensure a smooth transition to a successor provider or providers. In the meantime, Charter is required to to keep providing service and keep carrying its obligations under state law—all while ensuring that its existing customers experience no interruption in service during the transition. That’s a lot to ask of a company that, according to the commission’s own findings, has already failed so stupendously at doing what it’s supposed to do. PSC Chairman John Rhodes says Charter has shown “brazenly disrespectful behavior toward New York State and its customers,” and yet customers are now expected to trust that same company to oversee a smooth and orderly transition to a new provider?

AT&T: “Competition has never been greater than it has been over the past two years, and as a result prices are at all-time lows, output is at all-time highs, and innovation, network quality and consumer satisfaction are at unprecedented levels.”

Verizon: “The evidence of a robustly competitive and innovative mobile wireless marketplace remains overwhelming and is only growing stronger."

But not everyone in the wireless industry is seeing the same picture.

Competitive Carriers Association: “As the mobile industry finds itself in the midst of a major technological transition to 5G, the fact remains that much of the country still lacks access to reliable mobile wireless service including 3G and 4G. In reality, the increasing concentration of the wireless market between the two largest providers—AT&T and Verizon—combined with existing regulatory barriers to wireless market expansion negatively impact competitive entry and competitive expansion, particularly in rural and remote areas.

The financial challenges YouTube TV and other “virtual cable” providers face is a good illustration of some points we’ve been making at Public Knowledge for a while. "These streaming services have yet to figure out how to make money. In fact, the more people they sign up, the more money they lose. That’s because the services are paying more for programming than what they’re charging consumers.” Why is this? Basically, the incentives of large content providers and big cable make offering viewers more choice very difficult. Large content providers bundle their programming together and require that cable companies put their channels—even the less popular ones—in lower tiers where they get more subscribers. This ends up costing viewers a lot, but cable companies themselves take a margin on this so they profit, too. It’s a symbiotic relationship. To keep it going, the largest cable companies, in turn, require that content providers (large and small) give them “most favored nation” status, meaning that new entrants can’t get better deals, both in terms of cost but also in terms of on-demand rights and so on. (Some programmers might want to give discounts to new entrants to create more competition.) Some of the large incumbent distributors, such as big cable companies, may also simply pay smaller programmers less, or just drop them, if they make their programming available online in any way.

If policymakers want to ensure that “skinny bundles,” more consumer choice including a la carte options, and other innovative services are available, they should consider changes to the policies that make competing in this space so difficult, and keep prices high even in traditional cable:

• Eliminate basic tier buy-through rules
• Program access for online service
• Allow cable companies to carry signals from out-of-market broadcasters
• Allow set-top box competition
• Block mergers
• Limit most-favored-nation clauses
• À la carte (and pricing transparency)

[John Bergmayer is PK Senior Counsel]

I want today to register my concern that laws and regulations intended to promote privacy may build protective moats around large companies (some of which already possess significant amounts of data about people) by making it more difficult for smaller companies to grow, for new companies to enter the market, and for innovation to occur—and insist that competition be part of our conversation about privacy. If our concern is warranted, the questions for proponents of new privacy rules then must include: Are we willing to allow a reduction in competition or innovation? What competitive price are we willing to pay for greater privacy protection? Are we willing, for instance, to allow the biggest technology companies—lately the focal points of discussion about both privacy and competition—to entrench further?

New Jersey's lawmakers have embarked on a novel experiment to address a local news crisis: putting up millions of dollars in the state’s most recent budget to pay for community journalism. While public television and radio stations have long received government funds, new media experts like Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute say they have not heard of any other efforts on this scale, with a state helping to pay for reporting projects among a range of news media, including for-profit outlets. Journalists and public officials described New Jersey’s undertaking as once unthinkable, raising ethical concerns and stirring fears of government intrusion. Yet there has been little outcry, underscoring for many local journalism’s precarious position and a growing willingness to experiment.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced the appointment of Babette Boliek as chief economist for the Federal Communications Commission. Dr. Boliek currently serves as a professor of law and the associate dean of faculty research at Pepperdine University School of Law. Dr. Boliek earned her doctorate in economics from the University of California, Davis, and her law degree from Columbia University School of Law. Currently, Dr. Boliek’s research at Pepperdine focuses on applied economic and legal analysis in the areas of Internet regulation, competition and antitrust, privacy, and the mobile telecommunications industry. Her teaching responsibilities have included antitrust law and policy, communications law, corporations, and contract law. Dr. Boliek has served as a fellow with the Information Economy Project at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School and with the Center for Communications Law and Policy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She also has been a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is expected to start her work at the FCC in August.