The Federal Communications Commission has recognized a new era of cable TV with its adoption of new franchising rules, and so will consumers as those rules are implemented.
Suddenly, there will be new service providers offering new packages, products and services at reduced overall prices — an increase in choices at no increase in cost.
The days of a video market monopoly in most cities will be gone, reflecting vast changes in the technological world.
In 1970, when cable was getting started, no one owned a personal computer. The Arpanet — the prequel to the Internet — had come about one year earlier. Tim Berners-Lee would not develop the World Wide Web for more than a decade after. AMPS (advanced mobile phone service), or as we know it today, wireless telephony, was still in its early developmental stages. And the Bell System was still rocking and rolling as the monopoly phone company. As Lily Tomlin would say, “We are the phone company and we are omnipotent.”
Today we are a cell-phone planet. We surf the Internet on our personal computers or hand-held devices. Choices abound and competition flourishes. And now vast video opportunities will join this thriving marketplace.
And technology continues to sprint ahead in some parts of the video market. iPods and cell phones have video capabilities, and new offerings are continuously advertised. That is mostly because the entry into those market areas has not been stifled. Now the FCC is eliminating the unreasonable barriers that stood in the way of enhanced cable competition and accelerated broadband deployment.
With the new FCC rules, we should have an end to much that has plagued the cable industry. For years municipalities have extorted local “educational” and “governmental” access channels from franchises. Cities have taken license or franchise fees that used to be dedicated to municipal rights of way and co-mingled the money in their general funds, aiming to extract the right-of -way payments beyond these special taxes.
They have also forced companies to build out into unprofitable low-use locales in the name of the expanded service areas. And perhaps most sinister of all, they have held companies hostage for alleged public safety reasons.
The FCC is going where Congress almost went. For two years, until getting bogged down in special-interest and pro-regulatory gridlock, Congress debated the benefits of a similar action. Many states have awaited neither the bureaucracy nor Congress. From Texas to Indiana and California to Virginia, state legislatures have been demolishing the roadblocks to video competition through statewide franchising alternatives to local requirements. This year alone bills are pending in such states as Florida, Georgia and Missouri.
Under the FCC’s order, states will still have the authority to apply statewide strictures, which hopefully will be used to free the market further rather than just becoming nothing more than an incremental midpoint between municipal control and the free market. We seem to have arrived at the point where many are beginning to understand that regulatory control belongs to the past. We can only hope so.