Cloud, Web Services, Dedicated Servers at Work in FCC’s Online Political File System
The FCC will use Web services, off-site backup and dedicated hardware to make sure its online political file system works well when TV stations are required to begin using it Aug. 2, Chief Data Officer Greg Elin told broadcasters Tuesday. Along the way, the commission is working to address concerns broadcasters have raised in testing of the system so far, he said. Separately, the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) wrote the commission to endorse an alternate proposal to the requirements that a group of TV station owners proposed that the commission’s majority didn’t take up in approving political file rules in April on a 2-1 vote.
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When the new requirements take effect, the commission is planning for a spike in traffic from the public, Elin said. “We have planned for an initial surge of people coming and looking” for the documents which will lay out political ad sales to campaigns by TV stations around the time of elections, he said. The amount of public traffic to the site won’t affect broadcasters’ ability to use it, he said. “We're putting all of the broadcasters on dedicated hardware that would be separate from the public coming to look at the system,” he said. “We're limited in the number of broadcasters to just over 2,000 stations, so they will be able to log in at any time without any problems."
Broadcasters will be able to upload the contents of their political file in a number of standard file formats, but the commission will convert them to PDF forms, Elin said. That’s to avoid unintentionally passing along computer viruses that may be embedded in the documents, he said. In the future, the commission hopes to work with the public on making the data that’s uploaded more easily searchable, he said. Broadcasters will be able to submit the files using Web services such as Dropbox, which should make it easier on licensees, Elin said. “A station could create their own workflow for getting the documents set up locally on their file system and then be able to synchronize it to the FCC."
Meanwhile, the association that represents TV and radio news operations said it supports an alternate proposal by a group of TV station owners that would limit the amount of material stations posted to fcc.gov. After criticizing the commission for regulating broadcasters “in the name of assisting academics, researchers and journalists,” attorneys for the RTDNA said the group favors the TV station group’s alternative proposal set forth in that group’s petition for reconsideration. “We have heard from some of our members whose news organizations have tried to use existing broadcast political file resources … that the files are voluminous, contain extraneous information and require the devotion of extensive resources to detect patterns or to aggregate useful information,” Wiley Rein attorneys Kathleen Kirby and Ari Meltzer wrote on behalf of the RTDNA. The broadcasters’ alternative proposal would “prove more useful to reporters covering money and politics,” they wrote.