Presidential Candidates Think FCC Should Be Less Political

The FCC shouldn’t align itself too closely with either the president or Congress, the former commissioners said Sunday. The commission is meant to be “an expert agency” that is “insulated from political pressure,” Powell, chairman 2001 to 2005, said: “It is an institution that’s supposed to be above the fray.” It’s important to remember that the agency isn’t part of the executive branch, he added. Powell said an ideal FCC member is “a person who follows fair and open processes.” Much is at stake at the FCC, which regulates industries worth 17 percent of the U.S. economic output, he said.

Obama’s promise to “lower the partisan volume in Washington” extends to the agency, said Kennard, chairman 1997 to 2001. “Our little FCC world tends to be a pretty tribal place,” he said. “It really tends to be partisan.” Obama wants “open and transparent government,” he added. The FCC has become both more predictable and more contentious than during his tenure there, he said.

The FCC is an independent, bipartisan agency, and Chairman Kevin Martin works with other commissioners and members of both parties to get action on items when he can’t get five votes, a commission spokesman said. The commission is no less bipartisan now than under past administrations, he added: “All the commissioners past and present, including those speaking publicly on this very issue, have always tried to stay focused on the work at hand.”

FCC members “aren’t there to serve a particular agenda,” Ness, a commissioner 1994 to 2001, said: “An FCC should not be a junior Congress,” she said. “It is possible to get things done on a bipartisan basis. We just have to have the will to do it.” For Clinton, “transparency in government will be a big thing,” said Ness.

McCain finds presidential and congressional leadership lacking on broadband policy, Powell said. “Part of the problem is that broadband continues to be perceived as utility regulation rather than the powerful tool that it is for solving problems of the United States and around the world as significant as healthcare,” he said. McCain favors tax write-offs for companies serving rural areas, Powell said. “We also recognize that a lot of building needs to be done.”

Clinton would promote extension of broadband through tax credits and incentives, Ness said. The candidate wants the research and development credit made permanent and broadband and what constitutes an underserved area redefined, she added. Obama, too, wants a permanent R&D credit, Kennard said. “The government has fallen down in not investing enough in R&D,” he said. Obama thinks the FCC minimum for counting Internet access as broadband should be higher than today’s speed of less than 300 kbps, Kennard said. Powell noted that the minimum is rising to about 700 kbps. McCain, too, wants the research credit made permanent, Powell said: “I think we're all on the same sheet of music.” Moderator Kathleen Abernathy, a commissioner 2001 to 2005, described the panel as in “raging agreement.”

In March, commissioners voted for new broadband definitions to “track and evaluate broadband deployment over time against common benchmarks, while also obtaining more granular information on deployment at higher speeds,” a commission spokesman said. “First generation data” is for 200 to 768 kbps and “basic broadband tier 1” is for 768 kbps to 1.5 Mbps, among other categories.

Clinton and Obama think network management is reasonable if it’s nondiscriminatory. Obama’s been a “strong and consistent” network neutrality supporter but would support charging more to broadband customers who use more capacity than others, Kennard said. Clinton supports net neutrality but thinks network management shouldn’t be “unnecessarily constrained.” McCain is “very skeptical” of legislating in that area, Powell said: “Congress ought to leave their pens in their pocket.”

Clinton and McCain differ on whether to require cable operators to sell channels individually. Ness said a la carte “doesn’t make any sense” and could wipe out some programming. “She would not go there,” Ness said of Clinton. McCain wants lower cable bills and more consumer choice in programming, Powell said, but “understands the limit of government” and is concerned about “rate regulation masquerading as something else.” Kennard said Obama has no opinion on a la carte: “He is not burdened by history.” -- Jonathan Make

NCTA Convention Notebook…

Congress shouldn’t enact rules on net neutrality, network management or other high-technology and media matters, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said. “Transparent” network management is being done “through contracts,” he told reporters at NCTA late Monday. “We need to make the marketplace work. We are not going to solve problems through regulation.” Gutierrez said he’s speaking out against legislative requirements to make clear “the guidelines that we would like to see.” Some net neutrality bills under consideration depart from his view “in favor of competition, in favor of innovation and cautious against assuming that regulation is the answer,” Gutierrez said. The “considerable debate” on bills to prevent the FCC from making it easier for a radio or TV station to own a daily newspaper in the same market “is going in the wrong direction,” he said.

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Cable concerns it’s being unfairly regulated by the FCC should cause a look inward, Commissioner Michael Copps said. “It should kind of pain everybody that an industry thinks that” and maybe “cause yourselves to look at yourselves more closely.” There’s “a good degree of willingness on the part of the commission to look at what’s going on” with cable, which has found “middle ground” on some issues, Copps said. NCTA Senior Vice President Dan Brenner joked that “some might say when you get to 12th and D Street, where the FCC is, it’s pinata time, and cable is the pinata.” He also joked about frequent late starts to commission meetings. “The Federal Register now reads ‘guestimate'” for start time, said Brenner. “You really are turning the FCC meeting room into a 24-hour channel.” FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz joined in on the fun. “It turns out, Dan, that we're not morning people,” said Adelstein, referring to the scheduled 9:30 a.m. start time of most FCC meetings. At the FTC, Leibowitz said, meetings start on time and “no one withholds any information from anybody.”

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One of the biggest concerns about NTIA’s digital converter box program for Acting Administrator Meredith Baker are possibilities for “waste, fraud and abuse,” she told an NCTA panel. With more than 80 boxes certified by the agency as eligible for $40 coupons it’s sending to consumers, more than a dozen of which pass through analog signals, “that’s a lot of boxes, and Americans are very creative about how they go about marketing, and some of that can be confusing to consumers."

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The early end of analog TV broadcasting in Wilmington, N.C., worries FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. The pilot program for a market that lacks challenges that other places may face because it’s a flat region and doesn’t have antenna issues diverts resources that could be directed elsewhere, Adelstein said. “We may get a false sense of complacency” and “undercut the legitimacy of lessons we learn because it will not be a true test case,” he told reporters at NCTA. “What about the other 209 markets in the country?”

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Cable has weathered the threat from satellite to become the digital frontrunner, speakers said. “Cable has about the same market share as when DirecTV launched,” said CTAM CEO Char Biels, noting that the WGA strike caused an uptick in overall cable viewing. “Once they came to sample the cable networks during the Guild strike this year, they stayed.” The timing couldn’t be better for cable, Biels said. “We're going more interactive. Consumers have shown with the Web they have an affinity for interactive.” Mediacom Senior Programming Vice President Atelio Comisso-Winehead said interactivity and portability are vital to cable staying ahead of the curve. Comisso-Winehead said HD has made her company recession-proof, but she acknowledged: “Our consumers are price sensitive and if we don’t stay sensitive to that, we won’t have a business. We have to grow revenue in other ways to maintain our services.”

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Project Canoe soon will name a chief, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts hinted several times Sunday at NCTA. The project of cable operators aims to develop a targeted ad platform, which satellite-TV providers can’t do, he said. Most satellite operations are one-way. Telcos likely won’t sign up enough customers to start a similar project, Roberts said.

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A national WiMAX venture that cable operators invested in will sell broadband with top speeds of about 15 Mbps and average about 5 Mbps, Intel CEO Paul Otellini told reporters. A dissolved wireless joint venture between cable operators and Sprint “had some issues the last year or so, a change in leadership,” he said. The WiMAX venture isn’t a copycat effort like the previous one, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said.

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Talks for cable distribution for a premium channel that Viacom and others are investing in are going “very well,” Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman told reporters. “We've had a lot of conversations” in advance of the network’s fall 2009 start, he said. The channel will soon get a name, Dauman said.

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Using PVRs in set-top boxes as an ad hoc P2P network would free cable operator bandwidth, said Cisco Senior Manager Dave Lively. “The number of PVRs in homes that have two-way connectivity is increasing and the most popular programs are cached there,” he said. “Instead of the operators storing the content, the users are. Upstream bandwidth is precious. If I can redirect to a peer network, I can get a lot more efficient.” Others called it better to work smarter with the available bandwidth. Doug Jones, BigBand Networks chief architect, said, “We can’t keep adding programming so we need to improve viewer experience.” Cisco Video Network Architect Xiaomei Liu agreed: “It’s important to get more bandwidth but it’s equally important to use available bandwidth more efficiently.” She recommended variable bitrate encoding, saying it uses 40 percent fewer bits than constant bitrate and improves the picture.