Once again, Bernie is out there looking out for consumers over the interests of the Corporations.
Huff Po Reports:
Cable companies and their lobbyists are furious about the plan, which the commission is set to vote on Feb. 18. But the proposal didn't emerge from a vacuum. Liberal senators have been pressuring the FCC to act on cable "monopolies" for months. In July, current Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) organized a letter calling on the agency to collect a host of consumer pricing information from cable companies -- a move designed to show that in many regions of the country, households pay arbitrarily high prices due to a lack of other cable options. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Markey and Blumenthal all signed on to the letter.
Teaming up with dream-ticket, Elizabeth Warren, he’s showing that he can get things done against strong headwinds:
The FCC, of course, wouldn't have introduced its rule if it didn't want to. And other expert consumer groups -- the Consumer Federation of America and Public Knowledge, for instance -- clearly played a role. But the rulemaking still serves as a concrete example of successful policymaking by a handful of liberal senators in an era of almost total congressional gridlock.
So, what exactly changes?
The new regulation would open up the set-top box market to consumer choice so that customers could rent or buy devices from providers other than their cable companies. According to a survey commissioned by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), cable customers pay an average of $232 a year for those rentals -- a $20 billion market annually, just for set-top box rentals.
Backstory: Bernie Sanders says: The Cable Bill Is Too Damn High
Sanders and his colleagues asked for the FCC to publish a host of cable and broadband pricing data, so consumers could see how much they pay compared to customers in other areas. They asked the FCC to provide average prices for each state and each cable provider, and also asked the agency to publicize the average prices in urban areas compared to those in rural markets.
Read the full letter here.