Clarke Underscores Need for Impact Study on Set-top NPRM Effects

Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., warned the FCC the set-top box NPRM that Chairman Tom Wheeler advanced earlier this year comes fraught with potential unintended consequences. She and officials affiliated with the Future of TV Coalition, which strongly opposes the NPRM, joined Thursday in the Longworth House Office Building to outline their concerns with the NPRM and argue for additional study they consider necessary. The briefing was hosted by Politic365.

“The AllVid proposal has since developed into an FCC notice of proposed rulemaking” and has “raised a number of other questions around things not explicitly outlined in the proposal,” Clarke, a member of the Commerce Committee, told Capitol Hill staffers, reporters and industry observers. Companies worry about “burdensome” requirements and copyright, concerns that “resurfaced in the most recent discussion about unlocking the set-top box,” Clarke said.

Clarke has been one of the most persistent Democratic critics of the NPRM. She led a December letter with many Congressional Black Caucus members cautioning about AllVid, a label that Wheeler has rejected (see 1512020053); in March she requested the Congressional Research Service study the effects on small and minority programmers (see 1603220053); and this month, she and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., requested a GAO impact study on effects on independent and diverse networks (see 1604010053). At Thursday’s briefing, all the seats included a one-page sheet about the Future of TV Coalition, which includes members such as AT&T, MPAA, NCTA and USTelecom. The day before, MPAA and NCTA spoke at an event where they also slammed the proceeding and touted pay-TV's apps-based approach (see 1604130052). Wheeler has countered these arguments many times over recent months and insisted his proposal would protect both privacy and copyright protections.

Unlocking the box would alter the dynamic for small providers and “change that pond, in one fell swoop, into an ocean,” Clarke said. “These smaller companies find it difficult to survive in that ocean.” She cited existing arrangements that help allow smaller companies to remain tenable.

Leaders from two coalition members, LGBT Technology Partnership & Institute and Crossings TV, slammed the NPRM at Thursday’s briefing, as did Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council Chief Research Officer Nicol Turner-Lee. “It’s a question of unasked questions,” Crossings TV CEO Frank Washington said. “Localism is a good example. There’s one mention in the NPRM of the idea of diversity.” The rulemaking doesn’t say what diversity would look like under the NPRM’s implementation, he said. “Crossings TV could not be created using an Internet environment,” he said. “The economics simply would not allow it.” He said “the whole Internet concept works on the basis of having a huge enough audience,” which may work for Google but is a fundamentally different business model.

“There are more unanswered or unasked questions than any of us are comfortable with,” LGBT Technology Partnership & Institute General Counsel Carlos Gutierrez said. He cited the issue of privacy and argued that “the lack of specifics in the FCC’s order is very troubling for the LGBT community.” He argued that under the new regime, there would not be the same protections for data as traditionally. “There is no recourse for consumers in the way that consumers have recourse against cable and satellite companies,” he said.

“There is a blanket failure to hold accountable,” Washington said. He also questioned the underlying premise of the NPRM. “I think an app-based model is where we’re going to end up regardless of what the Commission does,” he said.

The FCC “should gather evidence first,” Turner-Lee argued, stressing the need for an impact study to see how a future model would work. Programmers are “scared by this proposal” because “they haven’t figured out how to monetize it,” she said.