The FCC is likely to have a DTV broadcast flag item on its Oct. m...

The FCC is likely to have a DTV broadcast flag item on its Oct. meeting agenda and “there’s a good deal of unanimity on the Commission on this issue,” said the former chief of staff of Chmn. Powell. Speaking at the Computer & Communications Industry Assn. (CCIA), Marsha MacBride said that despite outside concerns about the FCC’s acting, there was a narrow window if any flag standard could be incorporated in the next production cycle of DTV sets, following the plug-&-play agreement: “If we do it in 3 months we might as well do it in a year.” CCIA would be fine with a year’s wait, as it opposes the flag and believes it won’t work. MacBride said “there’s no sense in adopting a regulation that’s not going to work,” but said the FCC had its own experts studying the issue. She said the agency also had to examine “if it’s not going to do everything, are there still benefits [in imposing a flag] that outweigh the harms?” Some in Congress have questioned whether the FCC has the authority to impose a flag. “We're taking it very seriously the jurisdiction issue, and if we weren’t, we are now after yesterday” when the do-not-call list was thrown out by U.S. Dist. Court, Oklahoma City. She said if the FCC didn’t promote a flag, Congress must do so because otherwise some broadcasters won’t put out top content. Sen. Brownback (R- Kan.) repeated his criticism of possible FCC plans to mandate a DTV broadcast flag. Last week, he introduced S-1621 that would ban federal technology mandates. Brownback said a more appropriate way to handle protecting DTV signals would be the industry-crafted plug-&-play agreement between the cable and CE industries and ratified by the FCC. He was less enamored of a possible FCC rulemaking on a broadcast flag: “I don’t think this is the way to go.”