DC Starts Year With Heat Wave

As members of Congress headed home after a late December session, a lot of unfinished business remained on the communications front. Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission's broadband team was looking at the commission as a second home for the holidays, with officials working toward their looming Feb. 17 deadline for the national broadband plan.

The year ahead looks to be an extremely busy one, with the broadband plan implicating both broadcasting and cable (and virtually every other sector of the economy), media-ownership rules getting a vetting in the FCC and in the courts, network neutrality teed up, key court cases on content and network management, and perhaps even must-carry. Much of that action is front-loaded in January. A federal shield law will be on the docket for early 2010; Congress is slated to return on Jan. 19. The satellite distant-signal license also lost out to the dwindling calendar, plus a deal to let DISH Network back into the distant signal that made it too hot to handle before the holiday break. Lawmakers will only have six weeks (until March 1) to get a bill completed or pass another extension.

Broadcasters and financial types will gather at the FCC on Jan. 12 for the year's first workshop on media-ownership rules, with hope for some movement on that front supplied by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. That court has given the FCC until Jan. 7 to state why it should not lift the stay on the commission's loosening of the newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rules.