December 2014

EU’s Privacy Law U-Turn Seen Thwarting Google to Facebook

The European Union is backtracking from plans to allow US Internet companies to be regulated by a single data privacy watchdog in the EU, threatening the so-called one-stop-shop backed by Google to Facebook.

Amid a turf war over who gets to regulate some of the world’s biggest companies, justice ministers have dropped proposals to give sole power to regulators where companies have their EU headquarters. Under a compromise plan being discussed by justice ministers, powers would be spread out, giving other nations the right to veto decisions taken by the lead authority. “The proposal effectively allows each authority to exercise a veto over the decision of the lead authority,” said Wes Himes, a director at the European Digital Media Association, whose members include Google, Facebook and Microsoft. “All we want is one decision, one outcome.”

Newly Released FCC Documents Show Just How Frustrated Comcast Is With Netflix

Comcast is tired of Netflix, that's for sure.

The company had to answer a number of difficult questions from the Federal Communications Commission after Netflix objected in the strongest possible terms to a pending merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Comcast's answers are now redacted and available for all to see. And one of the most talked-about entities is Netflix: Its name comes up some 179 times over the course of the document, including in the footnotes. As the public portion of this process continues, it's becoming easier to understand the ins and outs of contemporary data traffic, although cures for the industry's growing pains are anything but clear.

Diversity tops agenda at Microsoft shareholders meeting

Diversity topped the agenda at Microsoft's first annual shareholders meeting with Satya Nadella as CEO.

Seated in the second row next to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's former CEO and the company's largest individual shareholder, was civil rights activist Jesse Jackson. During the question-and-answer session before 400 shareholders, Jackson urged Microsoft to hire and promote more women and minorities. Nadella assured Jackson that closing the racial and gender gap is important to Microsoft and pledged to release more detailed information on the diversity of Microsoft's work force by the end of 2014.

Why we're not going to see cameras in the courtroom anytime soon

A House of Representatives hearing on having cameras in US courtrooms confirmed that, as Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) put it, opinions on the matter are "strongly and sincerely held." It's just that those opinions are diametrically opposed to one another, which helps explain why it's unlikely we're going to see cameras in federal courts, especially the US Supreme Court, anytime soon. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have been pushing for courts to start widely recording and broadcasting their proceedings for at least the past 15 years, but judges have largely resisted the move. We won't see cameras in courts until the opinions inside the judicial institution match the opinions of the nation, or for that matter, of Congress.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Upton Releases Republican Subcommittee Rosters for 114th Congress

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) released the lineup of Republican members to serve on each of the panel’s six subcommittees in the 114th Congress. The committee’s GOP membership will include 24 returning members and seven new members. Upton previously announced the committee’s leadership for the 114th Congress, naming subcommittee chairmen and vice chairs along with the returning Chairman Emeritus and Vice Chairman for the full committee.

Telecom wonks may be most interested in the make-up of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology:

Greg Walden (OR), Chairman
Bob Latta (OH), Vice Chairman
John Shimkus (IL)
Marsha Blackburn (TN)
Steve Scalise (LA)
Leonard Lance (NJ)
Brett Guthrie (KY)
Pete Olson (TX)
Mike Pompeo (KS)
Adam Kinzinger (IL)
Gus Bilirakis (FL)
Bill Johnson (OH)
Billy Long (MO)
Renee Ellmers (NC)
Chris Collins (NY)
Kevin Cramer (ND)
Joe Barton (TX)
Fred Upton (MI)

NCTA Outlines Potential Title II Tax Hikes

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association wants the Federal Communications Commission to know just how much of a state and local tax hit Title II reclassification could mean to cable operators and their customers.

In a follow-up to a meeting between NCTA Executive Vice President James Assey and FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet, Assey drilled down on the issue to three key types of tax: property taxes, transaction-based taxes, and income, franchise and gross receipts taxes. "Reclassifying broadband service as a regulated telecommunications service may subject cable operators that provide broadband and their customers to materially higher taxes and fees, either because a statute specifically references the federal definitions or because a state tax authority interprets state law in a manner that follows the federal definitions," said Assey.

FCC Restarts Clock On Mergers and Establishes Dates for Respective Pleading Cycles

On October 3 and 22, 2014 respectively, the Federal Communications Commission stopped the informal 180-day clock and suspended the pleading cycle in the Comcast-Time Warner Cable and AT&T-DIRECTV merger proceedings. The FCC is now restarting the informal 180 day clock in both proceedings as of today, December 3, 2014. The clock for the AT&T-DIRECTV merger proceeding is reset to Day 70. The clock for the Comcast-Time Warner Cable proceeding is restarted at Day 85.

Comcast Opponents Team Up to Kill Time Warner Cable Deal

Opponents of Comcast’s $45 billion deal to buy Time Warner Cable launched a new coalition in an effort to convince federal regulators to derail the merger. The group, called StopMegaComcast, includes 15 public interest groups, competing pay-TV operators and other organizations that have previously come out against the deal. Members of the group include Dish Network, the Parents Television Council, the Consumer Federation of America and the Writers Guild of America, West.

Comcast publicly doubts its own claim that merger won't reduce competition

A blog post by Comcast Vice President Sena Fitzmaurice repeated the company's talking point that "if the proposed transaction goes through, consumers will not lose a choice of cable companies. Consumers will not lose a choice of broadband providers. And not a single market will see a reduction in competition. Those are simply the facts." But in the original version of this blog post, that paragraph was followed by a seemingly out-of-place sentence. It said, "We are still working with a vendor to analyze the [Federal Communications Commission] spreadsheet but in case it shows that there are any consumers in census blocks that may lose a broadband choice, want to make sure these sentences are more nuanced." This seems to be an editing suggestion that was disregarded -- but not deleted until after the blog post went live.

CenturyLink: Comcast/TWC merger poses cost challenges for telco TV providers

CenturyLink has become the latest service provider to protest against the pending Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger, saying that if the deal is approved, it will increase content costs for emerging telecommunications company TV players like itself that don't have the same scale and impede competition.

In a regulatory filing, CenturyLink said that large providers like Comcast, which have a much larger audience to provide video service, have more buying power to negotiate deals with content owners. Being a new player in the video services market, CenturyLink said it "has minimal value when negotiating for reasonable content costs" and if the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal is approved "the combined company's purchasing power threatens to push their margins wider and further from the rest of the industry."

Benton

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