Kyle Daly

Writing network neutrality legislation and broadly updating the Communications Act will be major priorities in the next Congress, top Republican and Democratic congressional aides said Dec 2. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) is “very interested” in working with Democrats to create legislation that would authorize the Federal Communications Commission to enforce looser net neutrality standards, David Quinalty, the committee's policy director, said at a Washington (DC) panel discussion with other Capitol Hill staffers. The FCC, meanwhile, is widely expected to roll back its existing net neutrality rules, passed on a party-line vote in 2015, during the next administration.

Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Bill Nelson (D-FL) and House Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) are open to working with their GOP counterparts on net neutrality legislation, aides for those panels said. Ranking Member Pallone would just have to be sure that any bill provides a “good deal for consumers,” David Goldman, the House committee Democrats' chief counsel, said.

The Federal Communications Commission is likely to change course and prioritize lifting newspaper and television station ownership restrictions when it comes under Republican control in 2017, agency watchers said. Industry analysts who track the FCC expect Republicans to relax rules once they assume control of the agency in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. That would include loosening restrictions on how many broadcast properties one company can own in any given market and lifting the ban on media companies owning newspapers and broadcast TV stations in the same market, a practice known as cross-ownership.

The FCC declined to ease those restrictions in its most recent review of media ownership rules in August. Another restriction — an ownership cap preventing one entity from owning enough stations to reach more than 39 percent of all U.S. households — is up to Congress to change. “A pro-business Republican administration led by Donald Trump is expected to push for more deregulation,” Geetha Ranganathan, a Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst, wrote in a Nov. 10 note. “For broadcasters, this may translate to relaxation of the 39-percent ownership cap and elimination of the broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership ban.”