Small Ball at the FCC

SMALL BALL AT THE FCC
[SOURCE: Multichannel News, AUTHOR: Ted Hearn]
[Commentary] At the White House, the Bush people do not, in the words of the president, play “small ball” ­ that is, kill valuable time on marginal issues. At the Federal Communications Commission, small ball is sometimes elevated to an Olympic sport, with all manner of slights meted out in those creatively subtly ways for which bureaucrats are famous. Last Friday, the FCC was at its small-ball best. In an action by the Media Bureau, the FCC said that an April 2002 ruling by then-Media Bureau chief Kenneth Ferree was wrong and vacated. Ferree had effectively told EchoStar it could, under certain conditions, require customers to use two dishes to view all their local TV signals. The four-page order overturning Ferree five years after the fact was unnecessary, because in late 2004 Congress outlawed the two-dish option, effective 18 months later. So what was the Media Bureau’s superfluous action really about? Payback, it seems, not about policy.
http://multichannel.com/article/CA6472088.html