Former FCC General Counsel Says Agency Has Authority to Alter National TV Cap
Congress intended for the FCC to retain authority to relax the national TV-ownership cap as market conditions change, said Wiley Rein's Thomas Johnson, a former general counsel at the agency, in an ex parte letter posted in docket 17-318 Tuesday.…
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The FCC “should not be duped” by “false-flag arguments” that the best reading of the text of the statute is that the FCC doesn’t have authority over the cap. Congress repeatedly used phrases allowing the FCC to modify its rules “because it was not mandating that these ownership limits be set in stone,” Johnson wrote. “Rather, these were one-time adjustments that Congress intended the FCC would continually revisit over time -- and indeed, that the FCC would modify or repeal these rules over time as the media marketplace became more competitive.” The national cap “places an anticompetitive thumb on the scale in favor of Big Tech. Relaxing or eliminating it would remove this artificial constraint on broadcasters’ ability to compete with today’s dominant media conglomerates.”