FCC OKs Most Cable Deregulation Petitions in Months

The bureau issued 23 orders removing five cable operators from municipal oversight of basic-video and equipment rates in the past 11 months, we found. Most went to systems in LFAs with a few thousand or fewer households (http://www.warren-news.com/competition.htm). The oldest petition that had been pending, made in 2007 by Cablevision for North Castle, N.Y., was approved in April (http://xrl.us/bnacco). That left a Time Warner Cable November 2007 request for some communities in Texas as the oldest pending petition, according to bureau statistics. Cablevision had requests approved for 10 other communities in New York (http://xrl.us/bmhgzw) and the Western U.S., where it acquired Bresnan Communications (http://xrl.us/bnaccw).

Time Warner Cable had petitions approved for more communities than any other operator from July 1, 2011, through June 1, 2012, our review found. The company got deregulation in more than 150 LFAs, including unincorporated parts of North Carolina’s largest metropolitan area (http://xrl.us/bnacd5), and parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Charter Communications had one petition approved in the last 11 months, for North Platte, Neb. (http://xrl.us/bnacej), while Mediacom last summer was freed of regulation in Waterloo, Iowa (http://xrl.us/bk4a62), and three other communities. The bureau said most petitions it approved were dealt with within several months after they were received. But it had 96 petitions pending as of April 20, 2012, compared with 56 waiting last summer, which was the lowest number in many years.

Some petitions from a few operators from the winter remain pending, probably because the petitions can take a backseat to higher-priority issues bureau staff are dealing with at any point in time, lawyers who make the requests said. The 2009 full-power DTV transition and work on the 2010 FCC National Broadband Plan were examples of issues that drew considerable bureau staff attention. Most petitions now are put on public notice within a few weeks of being made, which starts a comment cycle on them, and some are approved in a month or two, industry officials said. The NCTA applauds the Media Bureau’s “effort to approve the many effective competition petitions which have been filed in recent years,” a spokesman said. “Consumers today enjoy more choice, competition and robust services than ever before.” The commission ought to recommend Congress update the part of the Telecom Act governing effective cable competition, because petitions have been granted in areas where DBS isn’t providing enough rivalry to cable, said Gerard Lederer of Best Best & Krieger, representing Boston in the Comcast case.

A common thread among all requests the bureau approved since last summer is that they were unopposed. Many cities lack the money to hire a lawyer with expertise in FCC issues to oppose a cable operator request, lawyers for them said. “It’s difficult and it’s expensive, and that’s troublesome” for an LFA, said Lederer. “The community has to engage counsel to do it,” he said. “There is a financial incentive for the cable companies to file these and to prosecute them, and because of that we see where they've retained some very good lawyers and do it very well.” The commission doesn’t “take at face value allegations or claims that are made in unopposed petitions, and appears to do its own due diligence,” which is good for LFAs, Lederer said.

Smaller municipalities also often aren’t actively regulating operators, and so don’t take exception when a company seeks to be freed of regulation, said attorneys who file the petitions for operators. The many smaller towns where petitions are being now made don’t seem interested in opposing them, “or it’s not worth it for them to oppose them,” said Craig Gilley of law firm Edwards Wildman. Smaller LFAs usually have questions about what the operator wants to do, which they ask the company, he said. NATOA’s Listserv hasn’t recently had many messages on effective competition petitions, said Executive Director Steve Traylor. The group hasn’t “had a lot of folks expressing an interest in this particular issue,” he said.

Bureau staff, who have permission to approve or deny petitions on their own and without getting the office of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski involved, seem to issue the orders in batches when there aren’t other priorities taking precedence, said cable lawyers who file the requests. “The processing is efficient,” said Gilley. Speeding things up is that petitions last year started being made electronically, which means it takes less time to issue public notices on the requests and paper copies don’t need to be filed by operators and tracked by bureau staff, he said. “That certainly makes things quicker,” and “that seems to be working a lot better,” Gilley said. “Things tend not to get lost.”

The current situation’s nothing like a few years ago, when a backlog of requests mounted and it took longer to process them, cable lawyers said. “The bureau has done a much better job of moving the petitions in a reasonable, timely way” with four to six months being a reasonable period in which the requests often get approved, said Gary Lutzger of Dow Lohnes. “At one point they got so backlogged that things really did grind to a halt” with “too few” staff “and too many petitions,” he said. “Now that the rates of filing them have come down, they've been handled in a much more timely way.”