One of the most perplexing issues in communications policy — with a convoluted 20-year history — is that of the cable television set-top box. We may finally be on the verge of a new era where the user interface is more important than that archaic box.
Nearly six months before this week’s reveal of iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was in talks with Comcast Corp. about “teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast’s cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web.” For content, the […]
The anticompetitive effects of vertical integration by cable systems have now reached crisis proportions with the ongoing refusal — already more than five months old and with no end in sight — of Time Warner to license Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games for cable or satellite distribution, or local broadcast, on any network other than its own SportsNet LA programming channel.
The modest few “open internet” rules FCC Chairman Genachowski has suggested are so trivial that, like all good policy compromises, they have angered both the left and the right. The far more important issue is the legal framework under which the Commission will support net neutrality regulation.
In the aftermath of a devastating appellate loss for the FCC on network neutrality, the agency and Congress face a dizzying array of alternatives and options.
Friday’s decision by the Federal Communications Commission to cite Comcast for unlawful violation of “network neutrality” principles raises the serious question whether a government agency should be allowed to issue what it expressly terms a set of non-binding “principles” and then make an official finding of illegality when a company fails to follow those principles.