Multichannel News

You may be old enough to remember the “vast wasteland” moniker that JFK’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Newton Minow, applied to broadcast TV’s handful of channels in the early 1960s. Well, a new generation of Minow has come up with a label for the new generation of multiplatform video. “Toxic Swamp.”

Senate Financial Services Subcommittee Chairman John Kennedy (R-LA) lit into Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai for even considering private spectrum deals with foreign owned satellite companies, which say they can free up C-Band spectrum for 5G faster than an FCC auction. Chairman Kennedy told Chairman Pai that his mind could be changed, but he was currently biased for a public auction so that the American taxpayer, not "Luxembourg" (where some of the satellite operators are based) should reap the profits from repurposing some of the band for 5G.

A number of civil rights groups have struck an agreement with T-Mobile-Sprint to expand on the companies' diversity initiatives significantly if the two close on their merger.

Cable operators are telling the Federal Communications Commission to use its new broadband deployment data regime for just that, collecting deployment data, rather than use it as a vehicle for collecting data on latency or price, as some have argued it should do.