FCC Chair Kevin Martin Drops Cable Regulatory Push, for Now

Following what The New York Times called a “lobbying blitzkrieg” by the cable companies, FCC chairman Kevin Martin announced that he is tabling his push to increase the agency’s authority over the cable television industry after failing to win enough support from fellow panel members.

The FCC will revisit the issue after it receives more data from cable companies, writes Bloomberg.

A majority of commissioners on the five-person panel said the draft report behind Martin’s push was based on figures that may not be accurate. Republican Robert McDowell and Democrat Jonathan Adelstein said that the figures in the report - which claimed that more than 70 percent of households have access to at least 36 cable channels and that more than 70 percent of those homes subscribe to a cable service - are “questionable.”

If the FCC had agreed that those figures were accurate - that the U.S. had reached the so-called 70/70 threshold - it would gain authority to impose more rules on cable operators under a 1984 law.

The draft figures came from research supplied by Warren Communications Inc., but excluded data from the cable companies that indicated only 54 percent of households with access to cable subscribe.

The resulting compromise was “a significant, though not total, victory for the cable industry,” according to The Times, because, while the commission agreed to postpone a decision over whether the agency’s regulatory authority over the cable industry should be expanded, it didn’t reject the decision outright.

Martin also dropped his proposal that would have forced Comcast and Time Warner Cable to work to resolve disputes with the National Football League’s cable network. The disagreement has come to a head because, the way things stand now, millions of subscribers will be unable to watch the Nov. 29 game between Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers on the NFL Channel.