Dish Poised to Offer Distant Signals Again
Dish Network seems to be within months of a legislative victory that would free it from a ban on distant signal importation, as Congress moves forward with satellite reauthorization legislation. The Senate Communications Subcommittee plans the first action on the bill in a hearing Wednesday. The House Commerce Committee will take up the bill soon, said a committee aide. The House and Senate Judiciary committees have passed separate versions of the bill leaving the details far from certain, say several congressional officials and lobbyists.
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Markups ahead in the Commerce committees are expected to produce substantial changes regarding distant signals, said lobbyists who are following the issue. Having gotten through the Judiciary committees with little debate, they seem set for floor passage in the House and Senate, aides from both committees said. But “there is still a lot of work before this gets enacted,” said one.
The Judiciary committees have taken very different approaches to restoring Dish’s distant signal rights, taken away by an injunction in 2006. Dish offered to provide local-into-local service throughout the country to get lawmakers’ to support its effort. Judiciary Republicans have been resistant to lifting the injunction, out of reluctance to overrule a court. But lawmakers from both parties seem willing to allow Dish some use of distant signals.
The House satellite reauthorization bill (HR-3570) would lift the injunction in exchange for Dish’s agreement to provide local-into-local in all 210 designated market areas (CD Sept 17 p3). Sources said the deal was helped along by House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, D- Va., who has a major Dish customer-service center in his district and was trying to get both DBS providers to serve all markets. Dish CEO Charlie Ergen sent a letter June 23 to Boucher, who’s on the Judiciary and Commerce committees, agreeing to provide local-into-local to all markets if the injunction is lifted.
Republicans opposed lifting the injunction and ended negotiations with the Democrats, according to an official familiar with the process. “Once the majority made clear they were going to insist on including that provision in the bill, we stopped participating in the process,” said a House Judiciary Committee aide. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce believes lifting the injunction “without addressing the core concerns raised by [Dish’s] systematic violations of the rights of intellectual property owners not only would establish a dangerous precedent, but also would stand in stark contrast to the work of the Committee,” it said in a letter to Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and ranking member Lamar Smith, R-Texas. Still, the bill was approved 34-0. Smith expressed his concerns but voted in favor.
Meanwhile, the Senate’s TV Modernization Act (S-1670) would, without lifting the injunction, allow Dish in some case to offer distant signals by having the local signal license cover some rights now included in the distant signal license. The bill would impose retransmission consent fees in addition to royalty fees, making it more expensive for DBS providers to expand to more-rural markets, but the Commerce Committee may change the language, a Dish official said. Democrats considered offering to lift the injunction, but Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans made it clear that the bill wouldn’t get through the committee with a provision to do that, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee aide.