Lott, Breaux Laud FCC Set-top NPRM

Two former senators now working as industry lobbyists lauded the FCC’s set-top box rulemaking over the weekend. Consumers “should be able to purchase a device that lets them watch live sports, channel surf through traditional cable programming or binge-watch a streaming series,” said former Sens. Trent Lott, R-Miss., and John Breaux, D-La., in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. “This isn’t possible without action from the FCC. The cable companies, which have stonewalled set-top-box competition for two decades, are mounting a final fight to stop the FCC from giving consumers this freedom. Their incentives are clear.” Lott and Breaux, who now lobby for Squire Patton, slammed the attacks on the NPRM: “To protect their monopoly, the cable companies have been reduced to making desperate claims about encroachments on privacy and copyright law that could result from giving consumers greater freedom in the set-top market. But innovation elsewhere has caught up with them and exposed the fallacies behind this rhetoric.” Their clients include Amazon, which backed the NPRM in comments filed at the commission last month: “The NPRM strikes the appropriate balance, providing third parties access to service discovery, entitlement, and content delivery while empowering [multichannel video programming distributors] to innovate themselves.” AT&T, an opponent of the NPRM and member of the Future of TV Coalition, was also a client of both lobbyists until recently.