Slashdot Mirror
FCC Moves To Regulate Cable TV Competition
explosivejared writes "The Federal Communications Commission is likely to impose a new regulation on the largely unregulated cable television industry, the first of what may be more to come. Under a proposed rule circulating at the FCC, cable companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable would have to slash the price they charge smaller television programmers to lease access on spare cable channels, a move the FCC says would open up cable viewers to a wider diversity of shows. In addition, the FCC is contemplating a national ownership cap that would prevent one company from having more than 30 percent of all cable subscribers." TechDirt has a jaundiced view of FCC chairman Martin's animus against the cablecos.
The problem is that individual municipalities have been selling cable monopolies for decades... and in the old days, it used to be the case that no one cable company would get all of a particular large city, to ensure at least some semblance of competition. These days, they've all merged into one (in Philadelphia, at least).
What I think might be interesting is to decouple the wire from the service provider. Think about electricity deregulation: the transmission is seperate from the generation, and while everyone has to pay for the transmission (since we don't want overly redundant infrastructure), individuals can choose their generation source. The disadvantage here, as seen in the electrical case, is that there are more places to nickel-and-dime consumers. However, done with cable systems, we might actually have enough diversity of service offerings that it makes sense.
--
Educational microcontroller lab kits for the digital generation.
What we need is less government regulation and more freedom. Businesses should duke it out, and consumers should be mindful of what is happening and vote with their dollars when making purchasing decisions for products and services. I know that in many areas, Cable TV is monopolized, but nowadays with DirecTV and whatever satellite services, not to mention the Internet, also not to mention the option to avoid wasting time in front of the television set, it's not so important that the government needs to waste resources regulating this stuff. Remember: Whenever the government does something, it will be more expensive, less efficient, and less effective than if the same thing were done by private citizens or business.
Is that a euphemism for not raping their customers?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I suppose this change will make The Reality TV Rerun Channel cheaper to provide, but I've never seen any evidence that the limiting factor is anything other than convincing people to watch your channel over 299 others they already get.
Maybe I am just being cynical, but why is the FCC so interested in this? I've only heard the good stuff about this (cheaper cable, more competition), but there's got to be some downside to this. All I can tell is that the FCC just wants more power - but to do what? I have Comcast, and despite the general hate for them on net I've been fairly satisfied with the service, but the price keeps edging up every year.
I'm kind of locked in to Comcast because my condo fees pay for group rate basic cable for the building (I know the FCC passed something about apartment buildings lately and I have not looked into it). I can get an ugly dish on my balcony, but I am basically throwing away money in condo fees if I am not using Comcast. I'm sure if having an option to go to another cable company or dish would be that great if it means the building loses the volume discount.
How about requiring 30% to be good programming and limiting utter crap to 30%. Obviously it'd be best a 100% good programming but that appears to be unrealistic.
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/174231/family_guy_fcc_song/
Possibly NSFW
Where they only run cool stuff.
The other channels would be to hold all the crap.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
forced sharing of business? thats communist! i knew the the FCC was ebil all along!
I would be the first one to applaud the break-up of the cable-company monopolies. They seem to make the companies, at least Comcast which I have had experience with, cocky to the point of not caring about customer service, pricing, or competition in general. However, I am having difficulty seeing how the FCC can advocate for the end (or at least modifications) to this monopoly, while allowing heating, water, and electric utility companies to maintain theirs. Is there a differentiation that I am missing?
Excuse me for having missed the memo, but why is anti-monopolistic regulation in general or in this particular case a bad thing?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
This is IMHO yet more legislation that begs more questions. How much smaller is smaller? and what does slashed mean? To make some random guesses, if they are determining size by ad revenue then channels that do not sell ads will make out like crazy. If they do it my ratings, then weirdo ultra niche market stuff will do well. If they do it by company value The televangelists will saturate the airways.
None of these things sound useful to me. Who is it benefiting? Besides televangelists of course.
How is this not a repeat of the same story that ran over the weekend?
Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, and Tits
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
This has been dressed up to sound oh-so-sweet and only of good intention, but has a dark ulterior motive...
Simply, the industry does not want those smaller television programmers to turn to other distribution channels, say, oh, like the internet.
So now some think they are oh-so-smart-arsed think tank in an act of preventative-desperation has concocted up a spate of new FCC regulations out of the blue after decades of profiteering, to try save their doomed industry from their own greed. Well fuck them... Expensive media of poor quality pumped one way over a cable is a so last century. Its time for this stuffed full fat couch potato of an industry to roll over, and what we see here is just its death throws...
1. Start cable company
2. Get regulated.
3. Raise prices.
4. Profit.
5. Get unregulated
6. More Profit.
7. GO to 2.
The endless money cycle.
I am looking forward to the price increase.
( So far, it has NEVER failed )
Mod Parent +1 FUNNY. -quote from George Carlin...
You FORGOT:
Pants-Snake
One-eyed-wonder worm.
This thread isn't complete without a link to the FCC song!
Fuck you very much, the FCC!
If verizon doesnt have to abide by this also then this is really screwed up. It sounds like they are trying to make verizon a monopoly by screwing over the cable companies.
There are no monopoly licenses given out by municipalities, federal law prevents that and has for some time. Most areas have defacto monopolies, but that is due to the free market forces that make it overly expensive to "overbuild" except in highly dense "early adopter" wealthy suburbs.
Comcast invested X billion dollars rolling out that wire network, on the expectation it will earn them X*Y billion dollars in revenue. How can the government come along and usurp the wires from Comcast without paying up that X*Y billion dollars?
Yes yes the wires were on public land blah blah - but I don't see the government forking out that cash to build their own competitive network.
Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, and Tits
Your list is incomplete: you forgot Fart, Turd, and Twat. Actually, apparently the FCC has changed it's philosophy on verbal prohibition slightly since George Carlin's routine.
Wait, wait... the FCC is *thinking* of imposing an ownership cap on cable companies? How can you "think" of an idea you already had?
My understanding was that in the late '90s, there basically already *was* an ownership cap on cable. AT&T's entire strategy through that period was to obtain as much of the cable industry as possible and then to use those facilities as a new local-calling infrastructure, so they could take on the Bells head-on again. I was developing at Bell Atlantic in '99, and we were working on creating CLEC interfaces - I was working directly with the AT&T staff that were trying to establish local competition with BA in New York. AT&T's local services were all facilities-based (i.e. cable), nothing leased from the Bells.
Then they ran into a roadblock. They had been promised by the FCC in merger after merger that nobody would stand in their way. This was AT&T's whole gameplan - to build a brand-new local calling empire based on the cable infrastructure. But once they passed 33% share (I forget who they were going to merge with), the FCC suddenly stood up and said no. AT&T was billions and billions in the hole, and suddenly their whole gameplan was in the garbage thanks to the FCC. It was effectively the end of real competition for the telcos, at least at that time.
At least that's my recollection; I could be wrong. Anyway, it doesn't matter one hill of beans one way or the other whether they limit ownership of cable. Until they start forcing competition to be allowed in each metro market, it's all meaningless. My cable/phone bills are more expensive than ever, with even less choices than I had in the late '90s. It seems like the FCC has been *useless* to the American consumer over the past 10 years.
What would really be nice is if cable would be heavily regulated in every location where there are not at least two established players competiting against each other in the *same* market (and phone company vs cable company doesnt count)
Instead of the 3 local televangelist channels and 1 UFO nutjob channel I'm used to, I'm now going to get another dozen or so of the former and a generous helping of the latter.
Yay!
Otherwise, I'm stickin' with my bitchin' antenna -- OTA HD ROCKS!
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
If the FCC, or the government in general, were serious about regulating these cablecos in the public interest, they'd just revise all the laws to treat cable "TV", "phone" and "data" networks all the same. What makes them different is no longer their content, as each of those three kinds of companies deliver the "triple play" of video/voice/data, and therefore the same customers. There might be distinctions among networks that cross state lines, or that have either government contracts specifying special liabilities (eg 911 service operators) or market status (eg monopoly or some subsidy for growth or competition), or perhaps even provided by a government.
But they're all networks. They all have directly comparable service levels, competition requirements, public interest requirements, consumer protections. The distinctions by their content type, even if their media mix is somewhat different, is largely irrelevant. They should all be regulated to ensure they offer the same levels of service in their products, especially as they market those products to the same consumers as being "the same" as their competitors, like TV from the "phone company" or phone from "the cable company" or all of it from "an ISP". And of course the content should be regulated separately from the network access/connection - perhaps even regulated to break up vertical monopolies that currently bundle content and network together.
After the basic rules they can make whatever smaller exceptions are appropriate. Radio broadcasts, including TV and "wireless networks", that use the public airwaves, all can get their special treatment different from that distributed on private wires/fibers. Private wires/fibers that use public rights of way (like in most cities) can have their concessions to the public in exchange for their right of way access. And purely private networks can have their protection from regulation, where that's appropriate, specified. Unrestricted content, like pure broadcast (eg open websites, basic cable) can be distinguished from content requested by adults - which should be largely unrestricted, except where production of that content might violate (non-telecom) laws in force where the content is produced (eg pornography or defamation).
The sum total of all the regulations, even in the "deregulated" modern environment, is now a huge mass that raises operating costs (and therefore prices) by requiring lawyers and bureaucrats at every turn. A reformed legal basis could be much shorter, simpler, and appropriate to the modern age, where tech and marketing has leveled the playing field in a way that is not at all recognizable in current law.
--
make install -not war
Here in NYC, the cable companies have created a laughable charade to resemble "competition". It works like this: Time Warner and Cablevision have split the city into various districts. Depending on where you live, you can ONLY get either TW or Cablevision. They have exactly the same prices, too!
The only alternative is to get Dish Network.. which is problematic if you live in an apartment. This is total B.S. and I'm glad the FCC is finally doing something about it.
For competitive industries like retail and restaurants, that's exactly how it should work. However, cable is a natural monopoly or at best an oligopoly. Without sufficient competition, the customer will get screwed. Furthermore, it'd be rather difficult to go laying copper everywhere without some cooperation from the local government.
The (almost) proper analogy here is the financial services industry, which is highly regulated yet fiercely competitive. The regulation of that industry is good because it promotes competition. Compare that to the regulation of the medical industry which has choked off the supply of service providers and makes switching providers very inconvenient.
Because it would be inefficient to have two sets of wires going to each house, some type of regulation is required to make up for the lack of competition. As has already been suggested, the most appropriate and obvious solution is to decouple the physical layer from all network layers above it. Thus, the physical layer could be handled by the designated and regulated monopoly or, dare I say, socialized, while all network layers above could be opened to competition.
Let's talk about the real problem here: Cable TV channels are a huge waste of bandwidth. I don't care if The Perfect Channel(TM) is on my cable. I want it off. Give me NO channels and let me use that bandwidth for INTERNET ACCESS.
Right now your "Cable Internet" is using up about 10% of your coaxial cable while the other 90% is used to deliver TV channels. What a waste! If the FCC (or Congress) forced cable providers to be CABLE PROVIDERS (as in, they provide the wire and nothing else) then we could all have 100MB+ Internet access with the ability to choose from a nearly infinite array of "channels", P2P-distributed "shows", and any other content we wanted. If they truly want diversity, that is the best way to do it.
Using bandwidth for things other than TCP/IP (or similar protocols) is a waste.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Theoretically, at least, it's much more efficient to send the same content to many people at the same time. If everyone in the neighborhood gets the same show at the same time, then they share the bandwidth. If they were all streaming the same content over the Internet you'd find yourself with a smaller remaining share of the total bandwidth for whatever you want to do.
Where the cut-off is, I don't know, but I rather suspect it would take more bandwidth over the last mile than we have now to make it work. Until we have universal fiber from the head-end to the house, we're stuck with the broadcast model.
Until then, I'll gladly pay $100+ for all the premium channels.
99% of tv censorship is done by the networks to keep the sponsors happy, not the fcc.
grandparent is laying the fud on thick here.
If the FCC is able to do this, how long before they have the power to regulate cable TV content as they do with broadcast TV? Will no medium be safe from the government's intrusion?
I charge forward recklessly, leaving chaos in my wake.