Cable price controls wane

The last vestiges of cable television price controls are quickly being dismantled by Comcast and other cable companies, as well as the Federal Communications Commission. The town-by-town deregulation actions for the lowest level of cable service certainly will lead to price hikes for the people who can least afford them - lower-income families, according to Stefanie Brand, director of the New Jersey Division of Rate Counsel. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the prices for cable and satellite TV services, which are heavily influenced by unregulated services, rose at a rate twice that of inflation between May 1996 and May 2009. Basic cable entails local broadcast and public-access channels and is still regulated in local towns despite the sweeping 1996 federal law that wiped away most cable price controls. Cable companies, though, can petition the Federal Communication Commission for exemption from these final price constraints if they prove "effective competition" in a town from a satellite-TV provider, a telephone company entering the TV business, or a municipal-owned cable service. The pace of rate deregulations has accelerated rapidly with the growth of satellite-TV and the expansion of Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. into the pay-TV business. In the last 18 months, the FCC deregulated basic cable rates in 4,215 towns across the United States, including dozens in the Philadelphia area, under a little-publicized bureaucratic procedure that doesn't require a public vote of the FCC commissioners, according to information released last week by the FCC at The Inquirer's request. Overall, the federal agency has deregulated basic cable rates in a total of 7,542 towns, or locales, in the last 15 years.