June 2016

The White House has urged Republican lawmakers to give up efforts to strip the Federal Communications Commission of regulatory powers and tens of millions of dollars in budget funding. President Obama's senior advisers would recommend that he veto the House of Representatives' budget bill for fiscal 2017 because of these and other provisions.

The Republican budget proposal "includes highly problematic ideological provisions," like ones that "prevent the Federal Communications Commission from promoting a free and open Internet and encouraging competition in the set-top box market, impacting millions of broadband and cable customers," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement of administration policy. The budget plan includes sections delaying or preventing implementation of the FCC's net neutrality rules, which were just upheld by an appeals court despite a lawsuit filed by broadband providers. With the case possibly heading to the Supreme Court, a budget rider would prevent enforcement of net neutrality rules until broadband providers have exhausted all appeals. The budget plan would also prevent the FCC from stopping unjust and unreasonable pricing and data cap practices, regardless of the lawsuit's outcome.

As part of its investigation of cable and satellite television companies, the Subcommittee reviewed how five companies—Charter Communications, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, and Dish (also known as “multichannel video programming distributors” or “MVPDs”)—identify and correct overcharges caused by company billing errors. The Subcommittee reviewed how the MVPDs investigate and remedy these billing errors, with particular focus on their efforts to make overcharged customers whole. We found that the MVPDs vary greatly with respect to how they handle billing overcharges.

First, throughout the time period examined by the Subcommittee, Time Warner Cable and Charter made no effort to trace equipment overcharges to their origin unless customers specifically asked them to and did not provide notice or refunds to customers.
Second, other MVPDs have invested effort and resources to prevent overcharges and provide refunds or credits to customers who have overpaid. Comcast and DirecTV provide automatic refunds or credits to overcharged customers, while Dish’s billing system is designed to prevent these types of overcharges from occurring in the first place.
Third, based on data provided by Time Warner Cable and Charter, the Subcommittee estimated how much Time Warner Cable and Charter have overbilled customers nationwide.

In March of 2015, shortly after live-streaming via smartphones became a genuine phenomenon, Dan Pfeiffer declared that 2016 would be "the Meerkat election." "Whether it is Meerkat, Periscope or someone else," wrote Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, "the potential for a service that makes live-streaming this easy is limitless. It could do to television what blogs did to newspapers by removing many of the financial and structural advantages of legacy media institutions." Pfeiffer was mocked at the time — "as exciting as these new live-streaming social media apps are, they are certainly not 'taking over' Washington," wrote Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Meerkat indeed faded away shortly thereafter.

But live-streaming has surged in popularity in 2016,with Facebook joining Twitter's Periscope app in a new war for Twitter's attention. That battle played out on the floor of Congress, as Democrats staged a wild sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives demanding gun-control legislation. When House Republicans adjourned the session, forcing C-SPAN to turn off their cameras, Democrats simply began broadcasting their protest on Periscope. The illicit streams captivated the nation, as a promising but still unproven technology found itself at the center of the national discussion. Whether 2016 will truly be the live-streaming election is still anyone's guess — but it's inarguable that, at the time of this writing, these apps have taken over Washington. Politicians have now seen the value in live-streaming, and they won't soon forget it.

On June 23, a federal judge in Sacramento (CA) will evaluate a novel legal theory recently raised by the defense lawyer representing an admitted California burglar and suspected kidnapper. The lawyer, Thomas Johnson, claims that cops shouldn’t have been able to pick up his client's Samsung Galaxy left at the scene of a burglary—which they used to call 911, determine the carrier, and eventually track down the suspect. After a quick investigation of the March 2015 burglary in Dublin, California, about 35 miles east of San Francisco, Alameda County Sheriff's deputies zeroed in on a man named Matthew Muller. Over a few days, various law enforcement agencies executed a warrant at the South Lake Tahoe house where suspect Muller was believed to be staying. There, Muller was quickly arrested, and officials also found materials that matched a separate kidnapping case in Vallejo (CA) that had been reported earlier in the year.