Bill Kaczor, “Gov. Crist signs cable TV bill but asks for tighter enforcement,” South-Florida Sun Sentinel (via Associated Press), May 18, 2007.

Gov. Crist signed the video franchise bill that was passed during the legislative session. Several public interest and consumer organizations had asked Crist to veto the bill.

Comments(0)

We previously wrote about the video franchise legislation considered in this year’s session in Tallahassee. Well, the bill passed, with provisions that weren’t good, so now public interest groups are asking Gov. Crist to veto the bill.

John Kennedy, “Consumer Groups Want Plug Pulled on Cable Bill,” Orlando Sentinel blog: Central Florida Political Pulse, May 8, 2007.

The groups behind the veto effort are Florida PIRG, Tampa Bay Community Network, Free Press, and Consumer’s Union. Here’s the press release from Free Press.

Gov. Crist has until May 18 to sign or veto the bill, or it will pass into law without his signature.

Update: There’s also an AP story which has been picked up by outlets across Florida (here it is in the Gainesville Sun). The Political Whore at Creative Loafing Tampa also has a post.

Update 2: The Palm Beach Post has an editorial urging a veto.

Update: The St. Petersburg Times is also calling for a veto.

Competition is only a smoke screen to rationalize the industry’s mad dash to win the most lucrative markets. … This is a terrible bill, and the governor should veto it.

Update: Florida Consumer Action Network is now urging a veto. The Consumer Federation of the Southeast, Consumer Federation of America, and ACORN have also joined the bandwagon since the initial post.

Update: Henry Troxler at the St. Petersburg Times has a column in which he hopes Gov. Crist will veto the bill.

Update: The Florida Media Project, the Alliance for Community Media, and The Education Channel are all supporting a veto, as are the Florida League of Cities and the Florida Chapter of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisers. The U.S. Department of Justice, on the other hand, is supporting the bill, as part of the department’s “competition advocacy” (relating to antitrust law). The Orlando Sentinel has an editorial endorsing a veto.

In totally unrelated news, BellSouth spent more on lobbying than anyone else during the legislative session, more than $1 million — and that doesn’t even include the last month of the session, for which data are not yet available. The Miami Herald article calls the cable bill “the biggest special-interest food fight” of the session.

Comments(1)

A proposal being considered in the legislative session would re-establish Florida’s moribund Digital Divide Council. The bills are HB 1421 by Rep. Ronald Brisé (D-108) and its identical companion, SB 2304 by Sen. Frederica Wilson (D-33).

The Digital Divide Council was established by the Legislature in 2001 within the State Technology Office. The Council was authorized to design and implement programs aimed at increasing access to information technology by at-risk individuals and members of underserved communities. However, the State Technology Office was de-funded in 2005, and therefore the Digital Divide Council has been out of business since then.

HB 1421 / SB 2304 would move the Digital Divide Council to the Department of Education. The bills would require the Council to hold its first meeting by August 1, 2007, and to hold meetings at least every 90 days thereafter. The bills would also change the membership of the Council, and remove the requirement that the Council’s programs initially be implemented as pilot programs.

The House version was referred to the Schools & Learning Council and the Policy & Budget Council. The Schools & Learning Council referred to the bill to its Committee on Education Innovation & Career Preparation, which passed the bill on March 27. If the full Schools & Learning Council and the Policy & Budget Council approve the bill, it will head to the floor for a vote by the full House.

The Senate bill has been referred to a number of committees and has so far gone nowhere.

There is another set of bills pending that relate to another repercussion of the demise of State Technology Office. Specifically, since that office no longer exists, legislators are considering how to establish a new agency to oversee the state’s IT. I’ll discuss those bills in the future — namely, as soon as I make sense of them, because there’s a mess of legislative action happening there.

Comments(1)

The March 16 edition of Capital Report has a story about the cable franchise issue I wrote about earlier this week. The story starts about 1 minute into the recording.

Comments(0)

Continuing our coverage of issues being discussed in the 2007 Florida legislature, let’s discuss the issue of a statewide video franchise.

As I write this, I’m watching the House Policy & Budget Council debate HB 529, “Statewide Cable Television and Video Service Franchises.” A similar effort failed in last year’s legislature, and in Congress.

I’ll go for a very brief summary of this issue: like the others, it’s nuanced, but I don’t know as much about this one off the top of my head.

Basically, the bill moves cable franchises from local governments to the state. In other words, if you want to run the cable network in a community, today you have to get approval from the municipality; under this bill, you would get approval from the state. The push for this comes from the telephone companies, who want to get into the video business, but don’t want to have to fight their way through hundreds of local communities — it’s much easier to need only 50 approvals.

The argument goes that, by reducing the transaction cost of getting a franchise (and some have gone so far as to call local governments’ requirements “extortion”), you make it easier for the phone companies to compete, which in turn brings down the cost to consumers.

The counter-argument is that local governments are best able to provide for their residents and will be more likely to go to bat for their area than some state board that will likely get cozy with the industry. Specifically, local governments are known for attaching conditions to their franchises, notably buildout (requiring the companies to offer service in areas they would otherwise not go because they don’t expect to make enough of a profit) and public/educational/governmental channels, or PEG. In Alachua County, this is the channel that carries the county and city commission meetings, the Florida Channel, etc. Other municipalities may require a public access channel (think Wayne’s World); there was a movement to require public access in Alachua County, but interest in following through appears to have waned.

Most of the debate appears to be focused on whether the bill provides enough of these consumer protections under the new system. I won’t get into it more than that at this time.

So why do we care about cable TV? Well, we don’t really, per se. What makes this interesting is that the cable and phone companies also provide Internet access. That means that “buildout” is about broadband access and competition, as well TV. It also brings Net neutrality into the debate.

So what, if anything, will pass? I’d peg the odds at even on something passing this session: it might happen, it might not. On the one hand, the phone companies have their friends in the legislature, and there are those legislators that mistrust local governments and are willing to throw them under the bus. On the other hand, the cable companies don’t like this, consumer advocates don’t like it, and there are legislators that prefer decentralized authority on this issue. If anything passes, I think there’s a fair chance it may be language that’s more friendly to the cable companies or consumer groups, or both. My guess is that stricter buildout or PEG requirements might happen, but any kind of Net neutrality condition would not.

I’ll post some more links and analysis on this when I get a chance.

Comments(3)