Charter Communications wants to purchase fellow MVPD Cox Communications for $34.5 billion, the companies said in a joint news release and conference call Friday.
Verizon isn’t sweating a potential downturn in the economy, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, executive vice president and CEO of Verizon Consumer Group, said Thursday during a MoffettNathanson conference. “We are really resilient, and we are ready for any type of economy,” he said. Sampath called it “a little premature” to discuss tariffs on smartphones. “We'll have to wait and see" what the real tariff is.
Broadcasters are poised to execute a rush of mergers and acquisitions if the FCC relaxes ownership rules, but uncertainty about markets, the direction regulators may take and the future of broadcast networks could influence deal-making, broadcast brokers said in interviews this week. The agency's failure to relax ownership rules could spur a wave of bankruptcies, they said. “The industry is crying out for some relief, and it really deserves some relief, because we can't compete with the giant companies that we're forced to compete with now,” Media Services Group co-founder George Reed said. Tideline Partners Managing Partner Gregory Guy said “2025 is the most fundamentally important year for broadcasters in decades.”
The FCC announced Friday the approval of Verizon’s $20 billion buy of Frontier, in an action by the Wireline Bureau. The approval came after Verizon filed a letter at the FCC agreeing to get rid of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a top focus of the FCC under President Donald Trump. The FCC moved relatively quickly and the deal had only been pending since September (see 2409050010).
The Trump administration’s tariffs will affect the cost of network equipment used in building BEAD projects, but they aren’t the program's biggest challenge, experts said Wednesday during a Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition webinar.
The vast private capital investment in fiber is focused almost exclusively on getting it into the hands of the major wireless carriers since that is seen as a safer investment, Ting CEO Elliot Noss said Wednesday. Speaking at an American Association for Public Broadband and New America conference in Washington, he said municipal broadband projects can't count on private equity financing. Municipal broadband network operators also said a big challenge is constant lobbying attacks by large for-profit incumbents.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., told us Tuesday night that he doesn’t see it as a setback that several Senate Commerce Committee Republicans want to pursue alternatives to parts of the House panel’s budget reconciliation package spectrum proposal (see 2505120058), even as some congressional DOD supporters raised their own objections to the measure. House Commerce cleared its spectrum and AI reconciliation language early Wednesday on a party-line, 29-24 vote after Democrats unsuccessfully floated a handful of amendments that reflected their objection to using future FCC auction proceeds as an offset for extending the 2017 tax cuts and other GOP priorities.
States opposing the FCC’s July order implementing the Martha Wright-Reed Act of 2022 have shifted gears in part to challenge whether FCC decision-making is legitimate because of the false premise that the regulator is an independent agency. The order, which reduces calling rates for people in prisons while establishing interim rate caps for video calls (see 2407180039), is under appeal in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (24-8028).
Public Knowledge said President Donald Trump’s firing of the register of copyrights was illegal, and his termination of the librarian of Congress was motivated by prejudice. Register Shira Perlmutter was reportedly fired by email Saturday, and Librarian Carla Hayden was removed from office last week. “The president has as much legal power to fire the Register of Copyrights as I do, which is to say: none,” said Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose in a release. “The Register of Copyrights is hireable and fireable only by the Librarian of Congress, and does not report to the president or the executive branch in any capacity.” Hayden’s termination was likely within Trump’s authority but came after the website Libs of the Library of Congress condemned her, Public Knowledge said. Hayden was the first Black librarian of Congress, and the first woman. “Anyone who thinks these things are unconnected lives in a state of ignorance,” Rose said. “Carla Hayden was fired because she is Black, and Shira Perlmutter remains the Register of Copyrights -- no matter what anyone says.” The White House didn’t comment.
Given White House efforts to bring independent agencies under its control, it may be time to reconsider the FCC's structure, Free State Foundation President Randolph May wrote Monday. President Donald Trump's firing of two Democratic FTC commissioners and a Democratic National Labor Relations Board member is being challenged in court and likely will be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, he said. If SCOTUS sides with the White House, Congress might want to change the FCC's structure and functions "to better comport with what may be the new constitutional reality" of previously independent agencies now under substantial executive branch control, May said. One potential option he cited would be to split FCC functions, with policymaking done by a single official in the executive branch, potentially in NTIA, and a multi-member commission retaining responsibility for holding adjudications and enforcement proceedings. That quasi-judicial function should help keep the commissioners insulated from executive branch interference, he said.