Copps Seen Circulating Heavily Conditioned CenturyTel-Embarq Merger Order
The FCC is poised to move forward on an order approving CenturyTel’s $11.6 billion acquisition of Embarq, agency officials said. But the order won’t be ready for the agency’s June 4 meeting. Details were scant on the order, which has yet to circulate, though it’s expected to impose Bell-like unbundling conditions. And as previously signaled by acting Chairman Michael Copps (CD May 14 p9), the only item slated for that meeting is a DTV transition update, similar to a report by FCC staff at the May meeting.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
The 180-day “shot clock” on the CenturyTel-Embarq deal expires June 7 and Copps hopes to meet that unofficial deadline, officials said Thursday. CenturyTel CEO Glen Post said recently he expects the deal to close by the end of June. The companies have proposed numerous concessions to win approval for the combination, which their competitors have label “porous and vague.”
Copps marked his fourth month as interim head of the agency with an interview taped this week for a Saturday broadcast of C-SPAN’s The Communicators. Copps said the FCC will take on more issues following next month’s DTV transition deadline and predicted that it’s entering a period of “reform.” That could see the commission reemerge as a watch dog of whether broadcasters are meeting their public interest obligations in return for access to the airwaves, Copps said (CD May 15 p1).
“We're into a period of reform,” Copps said. “How wide is that window of reform open? I don’t know. I think it’s open wide enough for us to accomplish a lot. How long will it stay open? I don’t know. That depends on lots of other circumstances -- the success of the economy and everything else. That’s why I think when those windows open and you have an opportunity you need to take advantage of them. That’s why I'm talking about let’s get some stuff done, now.”
Copps said he continues to view his role as teeing big issues up for a vote by the new FCC, which is expected to have new members including Chairman Julius Genachowski and Mignon Clyburn, who will be nominated for an open Democratic seat. “A lot of these decisions that we're going to be making so they have to have the buy-in of the new and the full commission,” he said. “We're teeing a lot of stuff up … The [permanent] chairman will be able to move ahead on those at his speed and it’s a little more difficult to do some of those issues when you're still acting.”
Copps said he has met briefly with Genachowski and spoken on the phone with Clyburn, but just to offer congratulations and get to know them on a personal level. “There’s no lack of candidates for action out there,” he said, citing minority ownership of broadcast properties, the future of public, educational and government channels, special access overhaul and revised tower siting rules. “Those are things that the commission can and I think will be dealing with,” Copps said. “Once we get this DTV transition mostly behind us I think we'll be able to range a little more broadly.”
Elsewhere, Copps called for change in the direction away from the deregulation of recent years, picking up a broader theme of the Obama administration. “We need to get away from that ideological path that we've been going down and every issue is put into categories,” he said. “Is it regulatory or deregulatory? So often you lose mind of the substance of an issue, you lose track of it, can’t figure out what the really core questions are that you ought to be addressing … I do think we went through years of excessive, mindless deregulation.”
Copps reiterated calls for shortening the length of broadcast licenses, the NAB opposes. “We used to have license renewal every three years,” he said. “We had a list of some 12 or 14 public interest guidelines and when it came license renewal time we put the application down here next to the guidelines here and tried to make a reasoned determination whether the station was making a good faith effort … I'd like to go back to something like that.”
The obligation imposed on stations should not be “onerous” or “burdensome,” Copps said, adding he’s open to compromise. “There is a solemn obligation that broadcasters undertake and that we're charged to safeguard at the FCC. In return for … having access to the public airwaves you agree to serve the public interest,” he said. “The guidelines would have changed. This is the 21st century. This isn’t the ‘50s or ‘60s when we used to have that.”
The other topic Copps discussed in detail was broadband deployment and the regulator’s national broadband plan, which is under development at the agency. “I am just as enthused as I can be that this country is finally, finally going to develop a national broadband plan,” he said. “We're probably the only industrial country on the face of God’s green Earth that doesn’t have some kind of a broadband strategy and broadband plan. And again we were in this mindset for too many years that this will all just take care of itself, the market will get broadband out.”