CFA to Senate: Cable Power Threatens Over-the-Top Delivery

While broadcast and cable witnesses focused on the retransmission consent/must-carry regime in their written testimony, Consumer Federal of America's Mark Cooper is focusing on what he says is the threat of cable market power over online video distribution.

In testimony for the July 24 Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the Cable Act of 1992 20 years later, Cooper says that the government's cable competition policy has failed, and the door is open to the "dangerous possibility" that cable will exert what he calls its anticompetitive, anticonsumer practices to over-the-top video." Far from being mooted by competition, as some cable operators argue, the need for strong regulation remains, he suggests. "Twenty years of failure to break the strangle hold of the incumbent broadcasters and cable operators should have reinforced the premises on which the 1992 Cable Act rested: access to the means of distribution and "must-have" content are key bottlenecks. Cooper, a critic of Comcast on at least a couple of fronts, invoked the nation's largest cable operator in his argument about cable's power.