CPUC Tweaks OK of Charter/TWC/BHN

rehearing from the Office of Ratepayer Advocates (ORA) and Center for Accessible Technology (CAT), plus Entertainment Studios Networks and the National Association of African American Owned Media. In a Monday order, the commission approved part of the ORA/CAT petition asking CPUC to add conditions that Charter agreed to in a reply brief but that didn’t appear in the May order. The conditions involved service quality, semiannual reports to ORA, a customer service survey and communications with customers with disabilities, it said. But CPUC refused to add another requested condition, which was adopted in the FCC approval, banning Charter from imposing data caps or charging usage-based pricing for residential broadband service for seven years. California wasn't required to adopt the same conditions as the FCC on data caps and usage-based billing, and in any case, the issue is moot because Charter must comply with the federal conditions, the state commission said Monday. It disagreed with the Entertainment Studios application’s claim the company’s due process rights were violated because the CPUC OK didn’t mention its opening comments. "That the Commission did not adopt Entertainment Studios' proposals, which were never presented until they filed comments on the [proposed decision], does not demonstrate that they were denied due process,” the CPUC said. But the agency added a statement acknowledging Entertainment Studios filed opening comments and that Media Alliance and Stop the Cap filed replies, it said.