December 2nd, 2008
Oh, and BTW: 'Intellectually Bankrupt' FCC Chief To Be Around Until Mid-2009
There’s little love lost between the nation’s largest cable operator, Comcast, and the country’s top industry watchdog, Kevin Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
During his tenure, Martin has pushed repeatedly to usher in pricing of individual channels of pay TV programming, a la carte. That would tear apart the tiered pricing model of cable (and satellite) TV, which cable operators and programmers alike believe has created an ecosystem that gives consumers more choice at less cost than paying for one channel at a time. He also specifically took Comcast to task this year for the manner in which it blocked or delayed the transmission of traffic being generated by Internet users of a file-sharing service called BitTorrent. The argument: Comcast shouldn’t discriminate against kinds of applications being used over the Internet, even if it tried to manage bandwidth hogging by a few users to better serve the majority of users.
Tuesday, Julian Brodsky, a founder and vice chairman of Comcast, said the FCC chairman was “intellectually bankrupt,” at the OnScreen Media Summit, put on by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable at the Edison Ballroom in New York. He said any chairman installed by the incoming Democratic administration of president-elect Barack Obama “couldn’t be any worse.”
But, a few minutes later, former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley — a Republican from Obama’s home state of Illinois — said, in effect, the new intellect won’t arrive right away.
Candidates for top spots in the Obama administration face FBI checks of their backgrounds that will take three or four months. Wiley expects it will be six months — mid-2009 — before a new FCC chairman is in place.
Even if Obama acts right away.
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is editor-in-chief of Securities Industry News, as well as a long-time media, technology and business journalist. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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