NAB said the Justice Department wants the FCC...
NAB said the Justice Department wants the FCC to narrowly focus on antitrust laws over the public interest in attributing TV station joint sales agreements (JSAs), benefiting large advertisers and cable companies amid increasing online-ad competition. The association’s ex parte…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
filing Tuesday (http://bit.ly/1hxxXPr), to be posted in docket 09-182 (http://bit.ly/1l1diZy), responded to Justice last month (CD Feb 24 p7) seeking ownership attribution. The FCC is tentatively set to vote March 31 on an order that would attribute the pacts when 15 percent or more of ad revenue is brokered by another separately owned station in the same market (CD March 18 p1). Justice is “overtly aware that its advice is in tension with core Commission policies and responsibilities,” wrote NAB. The department “relies on generalizations about the structure of JSAs, not actual evidence of consumer harm,” said the association. “If the Department acknowledged that broadcast television stations face a host of non-broadcast competitors (as they plainly do), it would dismantle the Department’s rationale for its proposed rule change.” NAB cited “stepped-up use of ‘interconnects'” by cable, DBS and telco-TV companies jointly selling commercials, and “substantial competition” to TV stations from online ads that “have reduced broadcasters’ revenues as advertisers allocate more of their budgets to locally targeted digital, mobile and social media” ads. Justice had no comment.