Monty Tayloe

Lawyers for DOJ and 48 states, in opening statements Tuesday in the government's antitrust bench trial against Google in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, argued that the tech company exercised monopoly power through ad sales tools and through deals requiring its search engine to be the default on Android phones and in some browsers. “Monopoly maintenance starts with defaults,” said Kenneth Dintzer, DOJ senior trial counsel.

An executive branch push to reclassify marijuana under less restrictive drug schedule rules is seen by broadcasters as a positive step toward allowing them to carry advertisements for cannabis and cannabis products, but the move likely wouldn’t eliminate the legal concerns about carrying ads for recreational marijuana use, attorneys told us.

Susan Patrick, co-owner of broadcast brokerage Patrick Communications and radio broadcaster Legend Communications, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of filing a false tax return and trying to conceal $9.5 million in earnings from the IRS in returns for the 2012, 2013 and 2014 tax years, said criminal filings (docket 1:23-cr-00254) Aug. 31 in U.S. District Court for Maryland in Baltimore and publicized in a DOJ release.

Advocates for the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) will kick off a renewed push for the bill’s passage later this month with a fly-in of 100 representatives from newsrooms all over the U.S. to talk to lawmakers, said News Media Alliance President Danielle Coffey in an interview. Supporters are aiming for the bill to have an early reintroduction in September or October -- possibly bolstered by Facebook’s recent blockage of news links in Canada -- but the Republican-controlled House is a major hurdle. “We’re not going to see any antitrust legislation come out of the House Judiciary Committee in the foreseeable future,” said Josh Rogin, Computer & Communications Industry Association's vice president-federal affairs.

Hurricane Idalia’s eye left Florida around mid-day Wednesday, but the state is still having effects from the storm, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said at a 12:30 p.m. news conference livestreamed from Tallahassee. The FCC’s disaster information reporting system shows initial communications outages in Florida -- including for 58,941 cable and wireline subscribers -- from the storm, and the agency expanded the system’s coverage to include 16 counties in South Carolina, according to a number of public notices released Tuesday and Wednesday.

Congressional delegation of authority and enforcement power to agencies and the tenure protections of agency administrative law judges aren't unconstitutional, argued the SEC in a petitioner's brief before the U.S. Supreme Court Monday in SEC v. Jarkesy. The brief hewed closely to the arguments the SEC made in its loss before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, law professors and attorneys told us. “There’s nothing unexpected in it,” emailed Arizona State law professor Ilan Wurman, who filed an amicus brief in the case supporting neither party. A SCOTUS decision in SEC v. Jarkesy could have ramifications for other federal agencies that use ALJs, such as the FCC (see 2211030063).

Advertisers have been slow to shift their focus to streaming, but that's starting to change, said streaming industry officials Wednesday in panels during the virtual StreamTV Advertising Summit. Viewership “eyeballs” are surging, “but maybe advertising dollars haven’t quite caught up yet,” said DirecTV Head-Programmatic and Digital Sales Rose McGovern. Panelists also discussed ad targeting and discoverability at the event. Ad budgets for streaming are on the rise but “shifting or scattered,” said Aulden Kaye, head-Advertising Partnerships at Philo. The industry is “headed in the right direction,” McGovern said.

An expected gap in the creation of new media content caused by the ongoing writer and actor strikes is likely to lead to increased advertising on free ad-supported streaming (FAST) TV channels, but the industry still faces difficulty in reliably measuring reach and return on advertising spend, said streaming and ad industry officials on panels at the virtual StreamTV Advertising Summit Tuesday. “We need to have best practices, we need to have consensus around a coin of the realm,” said Tastemade Head-Global Sales Jeff Imberman.

The FCC has the authority to designate Fox-owned WTXF-TV Philadelphia for hearing over the false reporting on the 2020 election by its parent company, said the Media and Democracy Project Tuesday in a filing in support of its petition to deny the station’s license renewal. “Designating a hearing on this basis would not be regulation of cable content any more than revoking a convicted felon’s broadcast license would be an intrusion into law enforcement and the judicial system,” said MAD.

Interest is growing in the November window for low-power FM applications, but finding frequencies for would-be LPFMs is going to be difficult, said Prometheus Radio Project Engineering Director Paul Bame and REC Networks founder Michelle Bradley in a Society of Broadcast Engineers webinar Monday. Most inquiries received by Prometheus are coming from groups in highly populated urban areas that are unlikely to have room for new LPFM stations, Bame said: “The cities are tight; most of them are full.”