Dozens of cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston have filed appeals against Ajit Pai’s Federal Communications Commission to undo an August proclamation that would greatly hamper how much control localities have over what they can charge cable providers. Bloomberg reports that at least 46 cities are arguing that these federal deregulations would “force them to raise taxes or cut spending on local media services, including channels that schools, governments, and the general public can use for programming.”
The FCC’s order is set to cap what localities can charge in franchise fees, estimated to cost the cable industry around $3 billion every year. That’s $3 billion that cities are able to use to offset costs for local media, school infrastructure projects, and other considerations. Prior to the FCC ruling, different localities could figure out what they thought those costs should be when allowing a cable company the rights to profit off of their city’s entire population.
Under federal law, franchise fees are capped at 5% of an operator’s cable service revenue in each jurisdiction. The FCC’s order lets cable companies calculate and subtract from the 5% the market value of cable-related, non-monetary contributions, such as public-access channels and free advertising slots. The order also prevents local governments from regulating the companies’ broadband internet services.
The FCC, under the control of lying sack of abandoned dreams Ajit Pai, has looked to deregulate the already monopolistic telecom industry, taking billions away from consumers and putting it into telecoms’ pockets.
Their argument has always been that in loosening up and doing away with bothersome protections and costs, high speed internet infrastructure will get built out into rural areas. This, of course, is demonstrably false. In fact, every argument that conservatives have made about cutting taxes, or deregulating markets, has not led to more expansion and investment, but less.
This is not a surprise to anyone who opposed Pai. As Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel pointed out in her dissent of the August 1 vote, "Comb through the text of this decision. You will not find a single commitment made to providing more broadband service in remote communities. There is no enforceable obligation to expand broadband capacity. There is no agreement that any savings from today's action is pushed into new network deployment. I fear this absence speaks volumes."
People like Michael Powell, who heads up the cable industry trade group The Internet & Television Association (NCTA), will likely be unhappy with this turn of events, “American consumers expect and deserve next-generation broadband networks and shouldn’t have to see that progress slowed by some localities’ attempts to evade Congress’s statutory framework and impose duplicative taxes and fees.”
Of course, all you need to know about the NCTA is that it actually stands for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. NCTA renamed itself “The Internet & Television Association” in 2016, in the hopes of rebranding the cable industry sans the word “cable.” You see, instead of trying to make consumers happier by offering better customer service and not gouging consumers on bullshit fees, the big trade group decided that trying to convince people that they weren’t the same industry (in name only) would do the trick. It hasn’t.
According to ArsTechnica, “cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Denver, and Boston are among those suing the FCC. Also suing are other municipalities from Maine, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, according to a Bloomberg graphic. The state of Hawaii is also suing the FCC, and New York City is supporting the lawsuit against the FCC as an intervening party.”
Hopefully, the federal appeals process will work (as it has in many cases so far) in checking the abuses of power our current government is involved in.