28 April, 2017

Welcome to News Views, CASBAA’s news round-up culled from sources across the industry for the week ending Apr 28th. Curated by CASBAA, News Views keeps you in the loop. We always value your feedback, so tell us what you think!

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John Medeiros

Chief Policy Officer

Okay, it’s now official. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he wants to “repeal and replace” the Wheeler FCC’s order for sweeping “Net Neutrality”-based regulation of ISPs as utility providers. Net Neutrality, he said, was a bit of regulatory overreach that wasn’t needed: “Nothing about the internet was broken in 2015.” A few smart commentators noted that ensuring a free and open internet doesn’t require full-on utility regulation; I agree with that. But Pai’s speech yesterday didn’t provide any details, and I want to know what will he replace it with? There were previous reports he would advocate a code-of-practice system to deter internet providers from interfering with legitimate web traffic, but that wasn’t in the speech. Never mind…..the Internet lit up with the usual commentaries about how the change in regulatory approach would “Nuke the Internet.” Yawn; I get so tired of Internet Imbeciles who can’t make a coherent policy argument about public policy issues.

Andrew Lin

Regulatory Assistant

Meanwhile, Canada’s regulators are going in the other direction, installing broad net neutrality rules in that country and banning “zero-rating” for content supply services.

John Medeiros

Chief Policy Officer

Ajit Pai, by the way, is consistent in his deregulatory approach. He’s also said he wants to do a top-to-bottom review and get rid of outmoded broadcasting rules!!! (Hooray….finally a regulator who might actually DO something about the tilted playing field.) He’s also going to look at amending or doing away with media ownership restraints that look pretty senseless in the Internet Age. (“It makes no sense for the government to be discouraging investment in the newspaper industry,” Pai said last year.)

Kevin Jennings

Vice President

Some interesting news this week with Google announcing that it is rolling out programmatic technology that will allow advertisers and agencies to manage video campaigns across digital AND linear TV. Historically, TV and digital advertising have been bought and measured through different systems and currencies. This is something of a reinvention for Google who originally attempted this as far back as 2008 but with only moderate success and the project was finally dropped in 2012 – definitely something to watch this time around.

Andrew Lin

Regulatory Assistant

Netflix’s long time struggle to enter the Chinese market has finally come to an end this week as they established a licensing deal with local video service, iQiyi owned by internet search giant Baidu. Already reaching 100 million subscribers just last week and having their shares at an all-time high, this deal will further put them ahead of their competitors. It’s not clear to us how iQiyi plans to cope with the “full season clearance only” policy of mainland content regulators. Netflix, of course, pioneered making whole series available to consumers for binge watching. And, while there have been doubts about the wisdom of that strategy, some of the traditional-network competitors have put their toes into the water too.

John Medeiros

Chief Policy Officer

A few weeks ago we covered the Vietnamese government’s tiff with Facebook and YouTube, over hosting of politically sensitive videos. Last week, a Facebook delegation showed up in Hanoi to meet with the MIC Minister and talk about curbing “toxic content.”

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