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Comcast-Time Warner-Charter mega deal is dead

24 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Comcast’s “merger agreement with Time Warner Cable and its transactions agreement with Charter Communications, Inc. have been terminated”, according to a company statement this morning. CEO Brian Roberts was quoted as saying “today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away”.

And walk away they did.

So far, no official statement from Charter.… More

Comcast deal shuddering to a halt in Washington

24 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Hard to guarantee good predatory behavior.

UPDATE 24 April 2015: Comcast and Time Warner have officially called it off.

The mega-merger and market swap involving Comcast, Time Warner and Charter is either dead or dying, according to news reports. Bloomberg reported that Comcast isn’t happy with FCC and federal department of justice plans to send the deal into a hearing process, which is usually a prelude to killing proposed mergers, although it’s possible to mount a defence.… More

Feds figure out that the Comcast deal looks the same from Washington as it does from California

21 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Looks the same from either side.

The federal justice department might save the California Public Utilities Commission the trouble of killing the Comcast/Time Warner/Charter deal.

First Bloomberg reported that the justice department is about to send the matter into a proceeding – an administrative hearing – that would, in all likelihood, end with the mega-merger and market swap being tanked on anti-trust grounds. Then, the Wall Street Journal followed up with an article saying that Comcast and Time Warner execs were planning to meet with the justice department on Wednesday to try to negotiate their way out of that dead end process.… More

More lawsuits challenge FCC common carrier broadband rules

15 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Everyone jumps in.

The telecoms industry is piling on the Federal Communications Commission, filing a total of five separate appeals against the decision to impose common carrier rules on broadband service and infrastructure. The petitions were submitted to the federal appeals court – circuit, as it’s called – based in Washington, DC.

The most detailed protest came from the American Cable Association (ACA), which represents small cable companies…

The order (among other things) reclassifies broadband Internet access service as a “telecommunications service” subject to common carrier regulation under Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1996…[the sections of Title II the FCC intends to enforce] impose significant new regulatory requirements—including substantive prohibitions, mandatory procedures, and record-keeping requirements on ACA’s members, many of which have never previously been subject to Title II regulation of any sort.

… More

Net neutrality clock starts counting down

14 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Three, two ,one.

The twelfth of June is the day that new net neutrality rules will become effective. Those rules were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in February and released in March, and were officially published in the Federal Register yesterday, with the 12 June 2015 date specified.

There’s a big if involved, though. That’s only if a federal court doesn’t put everything on hold while considering the legal challenges that have already been filed and those that are expected to come.… More

Local California governments would have little to say about cell sites, under bill proposed in Sacramento

10 April 2015 by Steve Blum
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Sometimes, the shot clock means what it says.

What started out as a wide-ranging attempt to rationalise broadband construction policy in California has turned into a narrowly focused effort to drastically limit, if not end completely, the ability of local government to tie up cell tower and site approvals for years on end.

Assembly bill 57, authored by assemblyman Bill Quirk, an East Bay democrat, now reads…

The Legislature finds and declares that a wireless telecommunications facility has a significant economic impact in California and is not a municipal affair as that term is used in…the California Constitution, but is a matter of statewide concern.

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Muni broadband preemption lands in federal court

31 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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Don’t be abusing your discretion in Tennessee.

Tennessee is taking the FCC to court over its ruling that preempted state-imposed restrictions on municipal broadband systems. It filed a petition asking the federal sixth circuit court of appeals to “hold unlawful, vacate, enjoin, and set aside the Order, and provide such additional relief as may be appropriate” because…

In the Order, the FCC preempts Tennessee law pertaining to the operation of municipal electric plants, including the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, an instrumentality of the City of Chattanooga, created and controlled by the State of Tennessee.

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Verizon is all keyed up over common carrier rules

28 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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I gotta give Verizon credit: it posted its slagging reaction to the FCC’s decision to impose common carrier rules on Internet service and infrastructure in Morse code. Sorta. I also gotta make the geek points that 1. the proper code of the “era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph” is American Morse, not the International Morse that Verizon uses, and 2. regardless of flavor, Morse code is a means of audible communication – rendering it via typed out dots and dashes is something only a lid would do.… More

Broadband regulation is beyond California's reach, sorta

27 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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The FCC put sharp restrictions on the role of state utility regulators when it decided to put Internet service and infrastructure under common carrier rules. But it did not write the California Public Utilities Commission completely out of the game.

Helen Mickiewicz, a senior attorney for the CPUC, told commissioners yesterday…

The order affirms the FCC’s longstanding conclusion that broadband Internet access service is a jurisdictionally interstate service for regulatory purposes and therefor beyond the reach of the states…The practical effect of that, actually, is not so different from where we were before.

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Comcast says, come on CPUC, all the other kids are doing it

25 March 2015 by Steve Blum
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California is the only western state that hasn’t approved the Comcast-Time Warner-Charter menage and it’s lagging behind most of the rest of the U.S. too, according to a filing made by Comcast back in January and posted yesterday by the California Public Utilities Commission. The filing also gives a glimpse into how the CPUC’s ex parte process actually works, as opposed to how Comcast proposed to make use of it.

At a series of meetings over two days with advisors to three CPUC commissioners – Florio, Randolph and president Picker – a full poker hand’s worth of Comcast lobbyists and lawyers tried to chivvy the process along…

[Michael Brady, Vice-President of Regulatory Affairs of Comcast Cable] provided an overview of the status of the Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) and other states’ approval of the transaction.

… More