Page 95 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Cable Carr age D sputes

Other carriage disputes include video franchising requirements for telephone
companies. In 2006, the House passed a bill that stripped local municipalities
of their authority to oversee the franchising process. The proceedings from the
February 2006 Senate hearings on video franchising reveal a conceptual split
between the public interest advocates in the television reform community and
those with roots in Internet activism. The organizations that have worked in the
trenches of local cable franchising for years, including the National Association
of Telecom Officers, the National League of Cities, the National Conference of
Mayors, and the Alliance for Community Media, made the case that without
local oversight, national franchising would allow new entrants to redline their
way to profitability and undermine local community participation in developing
community-access television. However, Public Knowledge, the advocacy group
focused on intellectual property issues and the defense of a “vibrant informa-
tion commons,” supported national video franchising to streamline the process
and continue the deregulations set out in the 1996 Telecommunications Act
(for the Senate hearings see http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.
cfm?id=1700; for Public Knowledge’s hearing statement see http://commerce.
senate.gov/pdf/sohn-021506.pdf). Similar debates have ensued at the state level
(see http://www.freepress.net/news/21937).
The trajectory of these regulations over 60 years demonstrates the incremen-
tal approach that the FCC, Congress, and the courts have followed in addressing
disputes between broadcasters and cable operators. Must-carry decisions were
put in place, found unconstitutional, and then reintroduced to preserve free
over-the-air local broadcasting as a primary public interest goal in television. But
as broadband Internet technologies provide yet another distribution outlet for
audiovisual programs, this history also reveals more structural issues regarding
the property status of new technologies that can inform future debates. Govern-
ment regulators have held broadcasters more accountable to community groups
and citizens because broadcasters use the scarce public airwaves. Thus, the FCC,
Congress, and the courts have favored citizen viewers’ First Amendment rights
to access diverse programming over the rights of commercial broadcasters.
Conversely, regulators have treated cable wires as largely private property, fa-
voring cable operators’ First Amendment protections and limiting public inter-
est requirements to must-carry rules and channel space for public access. Yet
the private status of cable wires has been contested. Cable wires require public
thoroughfares (such as city streets) and public airwaves to transmit national sig-
nals to local cable operators. Thus, in 1958 the Senate proposed a bill that ap-
plied the same public interest standards of broadcasters to cable operators, many
state and municipal regulators in the 1960s and 1970s treated cable as a public
utility, and telecommunications officials in the Nixon and Ford administrations
recommended that cable be regulated as a common carrier with universal ac-
cess requirements. More recently, the debate has turned to the Internet with a
more market-oriented approach. In 2006, the FCC changed the property status
of broadband Internet from a “telecommunications” service to an “information”
service, which relieved Internet providers of universal access rules. A public-
interest coalition fought back by calling on lawmakers to include “net-neutrality”