Lobbying for an Unlevel Playing Field [Multichannel News]
Todd Spangler at Multichannel News has a good post about the FCC's proposed AllVid standard and the double standard of one of its advocates. AllVid is the FCC proposal to replace CableCards and require all cable, satellite and phone companies to install a device designed accept and combine multiple streams of video for distribution within a premise. It's a perfect expample of government intervention in the marketplace.
Enter Public Knowledge. During the highly publicized approval of the recent deal between Comcast and NBC Universal, the non-profit interest group that claims to defendintellectual property rights, competition, and open internet, applauded the federal government's conditions on the deal that would "lead to equal treatment of online video and cable or satellite video" with regards to program distribution.
However, when it comes to Public Knowledge's stance with regard to AllVid their standard was reversed.
John Bergmayer, attorney for Public Knowledge, has gone on the record saying that online video distributors (Netflix, Apple, etc.) should not be held to the same standards and restrictions as cable and satellite providers. Bergmayer’s explanation seems to be that both cable and satellite providers are given “special privileges under the law” that online video distributors do not receive.
What are these special privileges? According to Bergmayer, cable and satellite providers enjoy the legal privilege of negotiating retransmission agreements with broadcasters. Bergmayer goes on to claim that because of these privileges, “it is entirely justified to treat cable differently.”
Mr. Bergmayer, trust me. If you want your online buddies to have the "privilege" of being forced to negotiate retransmission agreements with broadcasters as we are, not one cable or satellite operator would object. Go for it!!
In other words, Public Knowledge for some reason feels that although online distributors should have the same access to broadcaster programming, they shouldn’t have to open their video services to the new FCC technical standard of AllVid.
It's clearly a double standard. An open standard should mean open for all providers, both traditional and online. But that doesn't appear to be the intent of AllVid advocates. To them, open means open for one set of video providers but not for traditional providers who would not have that same privilege, should online providers begin producing their own programming.
They may claim to represent the public, but many "public interest groups" receive large sums of money from companies. And then they argue, unabashedly, seeking the help of the government to give their donors a leg up in the free market.
The privileges that MVPDs receive go far beyond retrans--cable for years benefitted from rules that made it illegal to compete with them, and satellite providers get exclusive access to spectrum.
I think that online video providers ought to be brought under some of the same rules as cable companies, when the purpose of those rules is to promote competition. For example, program access rules, which have worked successfully to help DBS and telco IPTV, should be extended in some ways to online providers.
That said, there are differences between pure facilities-based and over-the-top providers, and there's nothing wrong with recognizing that. Particularly, I think that "connection"-type requirements make sense for facilities-based systems, but are not applicable to purely over-the-top services. These kinds of rules are about attachments to physical networks. In the MVPD context, that means set-top-box rules. An analogy is the way you have the right to use any phone or network attachment with a traditional phone company under the FCC's Carterfone ruling, but that kind of rule doesn't apply to Skype. Attachment requirements still exist in the Internet world, but are applied to the physical network (a broadband provider).
In short, the difference between a service that is offered over the Internet, and a service that is offered over proprietary infrastructure (or exclusive spectrum) is a real one that the FCC can recognize for some purposes and not others. Most regs were written in a world where most services were "vertically integrated" between the infrastructure or spectrum and the service offered over that facility. This was a background assumption, that needs to be modified.
Posted by: John Bergmayer | Friday, February 18, 2011 at 05:34 AM