Writers Guild of America, West is “opposed to the reauthorization process being used to undermine competition in the set-top box market,” Director-Research and Public Policy Ellen Stutzman plans to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing Wednesday at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen. “Consumers currently have too little choice when it comes to their MVPD [multichannel video programming distributor] set-top box and weakening Section 629 of the Communications Act by repealing the ‘integration ban’ is a move in the wrong direction.” The guild supports a clean reauthorization, she will say. “This Committee should take a hard look at whether the ’temporary’ Section 119 distant signal license should be allowed to expire as scheduled and as originally intended by its creators,” Schurz Communications Senior Vice President-Broadcasting Marci Burdick, a board member of NAB and speaking on its behalf, plans to say. “If, however, this Committee determines that an extension of the distant signal license is warranted, we ask that any reauthorization not serve as a vehicle for new laws that undermine the future of our free, locally-focused broadcasting system.” Also testifying are Dish Network Senior Counsel-Regulatory Affairs Alison Minea and Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer.

The Senate Commerce Committee scheduled a hearing on the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act for April 1 at 2:30 p.m. in 253 Russell, it announced Tuesday. Witnesses weren’t announced.

Several industry associations asked congressional leaders to reinstate bonus depreciation provisions, which ended last year. Renewing bonus depreciation and potentially “the comparable Alternative Minimum Tax credit in lieu of bonus depreciation for 2014” would give “immediate incentive for businesses to make additional capital investments, thereby boosting the U.S. economy and job creation,” said the Monday letter, signed by CTIA, the Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance, NCTA, the Telecommunications Industry Association and USTelecom, among associations in other sectors. “We are united in the belief that immediate renewal of bonus depreciation for 2014 will make an important difference in sustaining and expanding necessary capital investment and its resultant job creation. Bonus depreciation makes such investment a much more certain and attractive business proposition, and it encourages investment and job growth in America right now.”

Entrenched marketplace incumbents can pose an obstacle to innovation, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said Monday at Uber’s Washington office. Rubio was at a media event addressing a Florida law affecting Uber’s operations. Some outdated regulations sometimes are “a barrier to entry” for new innovative competitors, despite not causing bigger incumbents any trouble, he said. He posed various scenarios of this sort, such as “if the carriers had prevented WhatsApp from existing,” since the mobile app allowed a form of communications that may have competed with traditional text messaging that carriers facilitated. He marveled at Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp and how many hundreds of millions of dollars per WhatsApp employee the sale amounted to. Rubio also recalled his time in the Florida Legislature and a market dominated by cable franchises: “Your options were one company,” he said. “We had to pass a state bill to open that up.” Now, in a competitive landscape with Dish and DirecTV and AT&T’s U-Verse, “you get to shop for prices and bundling options,” he said. He also pointed to the struggles of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he’s a member, and how those lawmakers are always trying to pass laws applying to industries “moving faster than Congress ever could.”

NTCA wants Congress to focus on outdated program access rules and make other video changes, it told the Senate Commerce Committee leadership in a letter from CEO Shirley Bloomfield last week. NTCA asked for changes to be implemented as part of Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization. “Given the clear link between access to video content and broadband deployment, Congress should be concerned about the FCC’s inaction, which allows broadband deployment and adoption to be impeded by outdated program access rules,” said the response to an inquiry of Senate Commerce to a variety of stakeholders. “Congressional attention to this matter is particularly timely, as the prospect of cable giants Comcast and Time Warner Cable joining forces will only exacerbate the protracted fight being waged by small video distributors to secure programming under reasonable and affordable terms.” NTCA advocated for changes to retransmission consent negotiations as part of STELA. It said Congress should “strengthen the good faith negotiating standards and clarify what constitutes a per se violation” and kill the non-duplication and syndicated exclusivity rules. “There is ample evidence before the FCC showing that these rules provide broadcasters with a ‘one-sided level of protection’ and artificially-inflated bargaining leverage in retransmission consent negotiations, and are thus no longer justified,” it said. Broadcasters have strongly argued on many occasions for a clean reauthorization of STELA, which wouldn’t address broader video market issues. NTCA said Congress shouldn’t make cable operators retain retrans stations on the basic tier and that technology has “outpaced the need for existing rules” of the set-top box navigation and security function integration ban. NTCA pointed to one laudable aspect of the Consumer Choice in Online Video Act, introduced last fall by Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. “Section 668 of S. 1680, which would prevent programmers from arbitrarily blocking all consumers of certain providers from access to online content as discussed above, particularly merits serious consideration,” NTCA said.

One top Democratic office is signaling optimism for compromise going into the House Communications Subcommittee’s markup of draft Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act legislation, scheduled for early this week. The subcommittee will meet for opening statements Monday at 5:30 p.m. in 2123 Rayburn and then meet there Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. to vote on the bill (http://1.usa.gov/1jhR7Kg). “The draft legislation, which addresses a number of discrete issues raised over the course of the subcommittee’s year-long review, strikes the appropriate balance to improve the law without offering any fundamental changes to the marketplace, which are best left to our work toward a Communications Act update,” said draft author and subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., in a statement. Subcommittee Democrats expressed reservations about the bill at a recent STELA hearing, focusing on provisions on CableCARDs and language prohibiting FCC action on sharing agreements until the agency completes its media ownership quadrennial review (CD March 13 p1). “We are negotiating in good faith with our Republican colleagues,” a spokeswoman for Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., told us Friday. “We are hoping to come to an agreement, and look forward to working toward a bipartisan solution.” The markup’s background memo describes the draft’s STELA add-ons as “targeted, pro-consumer changes to government involvement in retransmission consent discussions and includes language to relieve cable operators of the obligation to include CableCARDs in operator-deployed set-top boxes” (http://1.usa.gov/1nKCVzM). STELA must be reauthorized by the end of the year or it will expire, and Judiciary and Commerce committees in both chambers have jurisdiction. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a STELA hearing Wednesday at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will be before Congress twice this week to discuss the White House’s proposed 2015 budget. Also testifying alongside Wheeler will be Commissioner Ajit Pai, the agency’s senior Republican. The first hearing will be Tuesday at 2 p.m. in B-308 Rayburn before the House Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee. Both commissioners will then appear before the Senate Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee Thursday at 10 a.m. in SD-138 Dirksen. The White House unveiled its proposed 2015 budget in early March and recommended $375.38 million for the FCC (http://fcc.us/1hNuRs2). Congress must approve any budget.

A top Senate Democrat defended the government’s phone surveillance program Friday, while expressing possible receptiveness to its change. “I continue to believe the phone records program authorized by Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act plays an important role in detecting and preventing terrorist attacks against the United States,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a statement of the much-debated bulk metadata collection program. “Again, this program collects only phone numbers and the duration and times that calls are made -- it does not collect the content, names or locational information of calls.” But Feinstein is “certainly open to changes” if there are alternatives that keep the effectiveness of the current program, she said, saying “the president is looking at alternatives and modifications to the current program” and she awaits recommendations from Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Witnesses for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization hearing are Dish Network General Counsel Stanton Dodge, Schurz Communications Senior Vice President-Broadcasting Marci Burdick, Writers Guild of America-West Director-Research and Public Policy Ellen Stutzman and Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer, said the committee website. The hearing will be Wednesday at 10 a.m. in 226 Dirksen.

The current retransmission consent regime is broken and in need of congressional fixing, USTelecom told Senate Commerce Committee Democratic and Republican leaders in comments submitted about the reauthorization of the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act. STELA reauthorization “presents a unique opportunity for Congress to address acute problems in the legal framework governing the retransmission consent process,” USTelecom said (http://bit.ly/1l7SCiB). It criticized broadcasters for their negotiating strategy and urged Congress to “eliminate broadcaster preferences and take government’s thumbs off the scale in the retransmission consent process by moving instead to true and free negotiations between broadcasters and” multichannel video programming distributors, and also criticized the rules surrounding must-buy and basic tier placement, suggesting they bring “imbalance” to retrans negotiations. It urged Congress to forbid joint broadcaster negotiation, to allow distant-signal importation and to adjust or kill the sweeps week rule. NAB has defended its retrans negotiations and in its own comments backed clean reauthorization of STELA that doesn’t include provisions on retrans. Coalitions of broadcast and pay-TV stakeholders, meanwhile, continued to pummel each other in blog posts about what provisions should or shouldn’t go into STELA. “If pay-TV is granted its ‘wish-list’ of regulatory add-ons as part of the STELA reauthorization process, it would ultimately tilt the regulatory playing field in their favor over TV broadcasters in retransmission consent negotiations,” a spokesman for TVFreedom, a coalition of broadcast interests, wrote in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1duhnNT) Thursday, calling for a clean STELA reauthorization. “What will the excuse be to consumers if pay-TV operators get the legislative add-ons and lopsided policy changes they are seeking on retransmission consent and no longer have the luxury of blaming broadcast TV for rising monthly bills?” The American Television Alliance, which represents many pay-TV industry interests, is planning to post another blog post soon, its spokesman told us. That post attacks broadcaster claims about the basic tier, bundling and sidecar agreements as illustrative of what ATVA calls dishonesty. “Broadcasters are lobbying to keep negotiations heavily in their favor,” the ATVA post will say. “When they lobby to keep ‘basic tier’ mandates, protect bundling, and prevent any rules that would prohibit ’sidecar’ ownership arrangements, their hypocrisy is exposed. They don’t want a free market; their business depends on decades-old government regulations in their favor.” Both NAB and NCTA have endorsed the one STELA draft bill that has been introduced so far in the House.