Latest news with #U.S.FederalCommunicationsCommission
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
FCC chief had no discussions with White House on Trump Mobile phone
By David Shepardson WASHINGTON: The head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Thursday he had no discussions with the White House about the Trump Organization's self-branded mobile service and a $499 smartphone dubbed Trump Mobile . FCC Chair Brendan Carr , who was designated chair by President Donald Trump in January, told reporters he had learned about the project through a public press release and had no conversations with anyone outside the agency about it. "We're going to run our normal process if there's anything that needs to be done by the FCC on that," Carr said. "I think competition is a good thing - so think it's great we get more sort of entry, more competition." Trump Mobile is powered by Liberty Mobile Wireless , a Florida-based company founded in 2018 by entrepreneur Matthew Lopatin. The company operates as a mobile virtual network operator, renting bandwidth from major carriers such as T-Mobile to offer its own service under a different name. Separately, Carr said the commission is continuing to review CBS-parent Paramount Global's proposed $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media. The FCC did not make a decision by the 180-day informal deadline in mid-May. "We continue to run our normal course review on that one," Carr said. Trump has sued CBS, alleging the network deceptively edited a "60 Minutes" interview with 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris to "tip the scales in favor of the Democratic Party" and the former vice president in the election. Trump's suit is seeking $20 billion. In January, Carr reinstated complaints about the "60 Minutes" Harris interview, as well as complaints about how Walt Disney's ABC News moderated the pre-election televised debate between then-President Joe Biden and Trump and Comcast's NBC for allowing Harris to appear on "Saturday Night Live" shortly before the election. CBS has urged Carr to dismiss the complaint, saying it did nothing wrong and that the complaint aims to turn "the FCC into a full-time censor of content."
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What's the most popular specialty license plate in Vermont? This plate takes the crown
Vermont's common loon is a symbol of grace, beauty and wildness. And in Vermont, the species adorns the state's most popular specialty license plate. Specialty plates are license plates with special designs that you can pay a little extra for to support a charity, sports team, school or other cause. They are not the same as vanity license plates, which are plates bearing numbers or letters chosen by the vehicle's owner. In Vermont, there are two types of special fund plates: conservation plates, which help support the Non-Game Wildlife Fund and the Watersheds Grant Program, and the Building Bright Futures plate, which supports the development and expansion of child care facilities in the state. The first conservation plate was created by the Vermont legislature in 1995 and featured a peregrine falcon. Since then, the plates have grown to feature five different animals, including the most popular loon, and have generated over $1.5 million. More: Two of the most dangerous animals in the world can be found in Vermont Here's a look at the state's most popular specialty license plates for autos, with data on the currently registered plates in Vermont from the Vermont Agency of Transportation. Conservation Loon: 2,315 registrations 2. Conservation Peregrine: 946 registrations 3. Conservation Catamount: 828 registrations 4. Conservation Trout: 690 registrations 5. Conservation Deer: 573 registrations 6. Building Bright Futures: 362 registrations To get a conservation plate in Vermont, you must fill out a Vermont Conservation Plate Application and pay a $32 annual fee. Currently, the Catamount and Peregrine Falcon plates are only available for renewals or replacement plates. To get a Building Bright Futures plate, you must fill out a Building Bright Futures Plate Application and pay a $29 annual fee. In addition to special fund plates, there are also plates available for those in the military or veterans, or people who belong to specific organizations. For example, over 3,000 U.S. Veteran auto plates are currently registered. To get this or other military license plates, you must have a Vermont Certificate of Veteran Status. Groups like police, rescue squads, or the national guard can get specific plates licensed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. And Vermont members of organizations like the American Legion or the Lions Club International can get plates with the organization's logo. This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: What is the most popular license plate in Vermont? Take a look
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Erasing the stars: Satellite megaconstellations are a mega problem for Earth and sky
In some ways, the stars above us are the ultimate equalizer: we're all equally far away, we all share the right to look up at them; and, tiny glittering pinpoints that they are, when we contemplate that cosmic glow, our fractious lives seem so brief, so comfortingly insignificant, compared to the light years they've traveled to meet our eyes. Vast, dark expanses glittering with stars are the skies under which we evolved: every creature alive has countless ancestors who existed under the light of stars visible thanks to the velvety darkness of the night sky. But industrialization has changed that, of course, by introducing light pollution that gradually erased the stars from view before the bright blue light of countless LEDs made the situation so much worse. And now, as the new space race heats up, spawning tens of thousands of satellites in orbit around the Earth, it only stands to make the visible night sky less so. Dimming stars are just one of many problems posed by satellites and especially megaconstellations, groups of hundreds or thousands of small satellites that work together to give us broadband internet and mobile connectivity. Starting in the 1950s and up to 2019, there was a sum total of roughly 2,000 operating satellites in orbit. But in May of 2019, Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX launched the first megaconstellation, Starlink, with an initial 60 satellites. (The small satellites that make up a megaconstellation launch in groups, with Starlink for example typically sending up 50 small satellites at a time.) But since that fateful launch, several thousand other satellites have made their way into orbit, with many, many more on their way. It's still not wall-to-wall satellites in low Earth orbit, but it seeming will be in the near future. (Astrophysicist Dr. Jonathan McDowell keeps a running list here.) The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has already approved well over 7,000 further satellites, and SpaceX alone is aiming to get tens of thousands of their own into LEO over the next decade. "We have our version of the famous 'hockey stick' plot from climate change, where the temperature is up, steady, steady, steady and [then] rapidly increasing. That's what's happened in space due to satellites," Dr. James Lowenthal, a professor of astronomy at Smith College in Massachusetts who, in his work, observes young galaxies so distant that their light has traveled billions of years to reach us, told Salon in a video interview. The projected figures are the definition of exponential. "Now there are over 10,000," Lowenthal said, almost entirely relating to Starlink. But other companies are increasingly vying for real estate in orbit. "There are over 200 projects [in the works], each of them with dozens to tens of thousands of satellites. The Starlink project ... has filed for plans to put in place some 40,000 satellites in low Earth orbit." Most of the non-SpaceX projects are private companies, too. But governments also want to reclaim their previous dominance of space, and everybody wants in. "India, China, Brazil are all close behind. The United States military is developing its own [megaconstellations] right now," said Lowenthal. "The nation of Rwanda has filed plans for 330,000 satellites. Whether that comes to fruition or not, it's impossible to predict. But there are hundreds of plans, and the numbers of satellites filed are now at least 500,000 heading towards a million within the next ten years." These satellites perform valuable services to humans on Earth and even, in some respects, to other living things — for example, by helping us monitor planet-heating emissions. In fact, recent research suggests they will be key to improving our data on CO2 emissions. Dr. John Barentine, an astronomer, dark sky consultant and historian of astronomy in Arizona, even pointed to the background image he uses for video calls as he spoke with Salon: it's a global composite image of Earth made by remote sensing platforms in space. "Without them," he said, "we would not have anything approaching the understanding of the problem that we do have." But weighing those benefits against the various harms of vast numbers of shiny bodies whirling around the earth is already enough to push dark sky lovers into action. Over the next ten years, our night sky may be irrevocably transformed by the projected legions of satellites. This affects the casual stargazer, both those of us straining to reconnect with nature on occasional camping trips in the wilderness and those of us who like to look for stars even in the city, longing to see shooting stars or the great spangled expanse of the Milky Way, but making do with a nice bright Venus or Orion's Belt on a clear night. "What you'll see is the satellites moving across the sky. Those are just reflecting sunlight, just [like] the way the moon is reflecting something. The moon is not shining by itself, it's shining some reflected sunlight. So satellites do the same thing whenever they're in sunlight," Lowenthal explained. The more of them there are, the more shine you'll see. But satellites also shine in two other ways, which laypeople won't notice."One, they actually do have a little bit of their own temperature. They're actually glowing in the infrared. So if you turn a sensitive infrared telescope to them, you see them. They're also emitting radio frequency radiation. That's how they communicate with each other and with the ground by usually short wave, or microwave radiation," Lowenthal said. This level of interference has been noticeable by radio astronomers for a while. It's manageable for now, but then, the numbers of satellites in the sky are a mere fraction of projected numbers within the next few years. "I don't think you could talk to a professional astronomer, an observer, who hasn't had satellites go through their images lately," Lowenthal said. "There are papers now, already, that had been published and then retracted, because it turned out that what we thought was a really cool thing was just another satellite." Such really cool things have included a near-Earth asteroid. "Nope," Lowenthal went on, "it turns out it was that Tesla car that Elon Musk launched into orbit around the sun. That will only happen more often." Beyond Tesla cars photobombing astronomical images, both amateurs and professionals have been photobombed by numerous non-vehicular Starlink satellites, including an image of the comet Neowise and others. Victims even include the low-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The use of the radio spectrum is regulated internationally by the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union, which publishes regulations allocating frequency ranges for different services or uses such as astronomy, remote sensing, communication and navigation, and also provides thresholds on power flux densities not to be exceeded by other services. The ranges allowed are narrow, far more restrictive than the sort of electromagnetic compatibility standards used on Earth, and unintended electromagnetic radiation can leak from electrical devices and systems on satellites. For astronomy, the protected range is 150.05 to 153 megahertz. Research published in 2023 showed that emissions measured from dozens of satellites on the Starlink constellation exceeded their intended and allowed thresholds, interfering with the frequencies allocated to radio astronomy. They actually exceeded typical electromagnetic compatibility standards used for commercial electronic devices, too. Now, research published in September showed that the second generation of Starlink satellites also has this problem. And it's 32 times worse. Satellites aren't currently the main source of light pollution that affects our view of the night sky. But given enough time, they may be — and to a very significant degree. While dark sky advocates have had some success getting individual jurisdictions to begin working towards mitigating the effects of terrestrial light pollution, mitigations are in no way keeping pace with the rate at which low earth orbits are being colonized by these zipping, flashing celestial bodies. There are working satellites in space, and there are non-functional satellites: what's called space junk or space debris. It's getting cluttered up there. In fact, the issue of space debris is older than the concern about megaconstellations. Dr. Aparna Venkatesan, an astronomer at the University of San Francisco whose research focuses on cosmology and the re-ionization of the universe after the Big Bang, is a committee co-chair, and Lowenthal and Barentine are committee members, of the Committee to Protect Astronomy and the Space Environment, an advisory committee of the American Astronomical Society. Since 1988, COMPASSE has addressed both ground- and space-based light pollution and radio interference, Lowenthal said, "and the threats attended to use and overuse of space, namely space debris. What happens when things start crashing into each other. And there's just, whenever we do activities in space, there's always some debris associated with it. It's noticeable. Now it's going to get much worse, then what are the effects of it?" One of those effects can be light. Not only because of especially bright satellites, but just because of their sheer numbers. "It's like many, many thousands of rotating, glinting ruffled potato chips, basically," as Venkatesan put it. "This glinting, rotating cage of hardware that, first of all, don't cause a streak alone, but are rotating and have a little glint that can throw off a lot of areas of astrophysics, like time domain astrophysics, that look for variable phenomena." "To their credit," said Lowenthal, "SpaceX has spent millions of dollars on this, and they've had several engineers devoted to this problem." They've tried things like applying darkening treatments to the satellite. They've tried giving the satellite a visor. They've tried a new coating that is super-dark. But nothing has been enough to solve the problem. Right after launching, a bunch of satellites heading to join the megaconstellation looks like a string of moving stars going up in the sky. Within a week or so, they reach a higher elevation and are less visible. But they're still not faint enough, despite six years of effort, Lowenthal said. Additionally, there's the problem of debris from satellites crashing into each other or trash that orbits — everything from droplets of fuel to flecks of paint and other tiny bits of things that float around the Earth at 5 miles (8 km) per second. "It's a thin haze that reflects sunlight down and makes the sky look artificially bright," Lowenthal said — Venkatesan describes it as a fine dust — noting that some recent research suggests that if debris keeps tracking with the amount of satellites, the night sky as viewed from anywhere on Earth could become several times brighter, perhaps even too bright for astronomical observations to be made at all. As well as brightening the sky and interfering with astronomy through their flashes and radio waves, satellites pollute the atmosphere on launch and on re-entry, as research from last October underscored. In 2021, the International Astronomical Union issued a report drafted from the work of 85 scientists that aimed to provide recommendations for how astronomy might be protected from the visible and radio impacts of satellites as well as from terrestrial sources of light through policy changes at local or international levels. When they talk about astronomy, this means that a large part of their focus is on protecting the remote sites where large telescopes and observatories are set up around the world from electromagnetic interference. But it's not just such remote sites that are impacted by satellites, which exert effects on the local and global environment both at launch and at re-entry. Rockets have long been known to pollute the atmosphere in various ways. Depending on the type of rocket fuel used, launches produce nitrogen oxides, chlorine, black carbon particles, water vapor, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide — and no propellant avoids creating of some kind of emissions. "There's a lack of policy regarding the environmental impacts of these megaconstellations," Dr. Connor Barker, a research fellow in atmospheric chemistry and physical geography at University College London, told Salon in a video interview. The many satellites now heading up to space don't live long: these days, they're designed to have a five-year lifespan to reduce the amount of trash in orbit. Getting them out of orbit means they re-enter the atmosphere, burning up — but not without a trace. In October, Barker and co-authors Eloise Marais and Jonathan McDowell published a multi-year inventory of air pollutant emissions and CO2 from rocket launches and object re-entries spanning the early growth of the megaconstellation phenomenon from 2020 through 2022. Such data, he explained, is very challenging to compile. Barker and his team used multiple sources to put together their inventory, crosschecking information they found in different sources against launch livestreams and studies previously conducted by other researchers. Along with gaseous reactive nitrogen, satellites burning up as they re-enter the atmosphere at the end of their lives leave tiny particles of aluminum oxide, imperilling the still-recovering ozone layer. Chlorine (which reacts with the aluminum) and nitrogen oxides also drive ozone depletion. "We're starting to see that we might be reversing some of the gains we've made from the Montreal Protocol through these increased rocket launch and re-entry rates," Barker said. So reducing debris in space might mean increasing the pollutants in our atmosphere. In fact, it's a bit of a battle of priorities, as Barker explained to Salon. And despite the laudable role satellites play in monitoring greenhouse gas emissions, they contribute to them too. "We're often dealing with large gaps in the data that we would want," Barker explained. Such gaps make it extremely hard to provide precise information about likely impacts. "For rocket launches, we don't even know sometimes how much fuel is used by the rocket or how much the rocket weighs or what altitudes the rocket operates over. Sometimes we get that information from American or European launch providers. It's extremely hard to get that information for Chinese launches. And then even harder if you're looking at something like North Korea. So there's a real lack of information that having all of that data would make our estimates more accurate." The researchers also have not had any direct contact with Starlink, which typically does not provide access to the data they use to make their own estimates and sustainability claims. Salon reached out to Starlink for comment via SpaceX, but did not receive a response. "It's proprietary, so they don't want another company to take the data. The place you usually get the data from is a user manual — a document used by people that want to launch a satellite, and that will contain details about the rocket," Barker said. The multiple authors of a December paper published in Nature's Communications Earth and Environment note that "Satellite technologies are essential for global conservation actions through providing continuous, real-time Earth monitoring." The fact that even recent research on the impact of International Dark Sky Places on light pollution relies on observations made from orbiting satellites should make the point. However, the huge increase in rocket launches needed to get all those satellites up there (there were 223 launch attempts in 2023), places a significant and growing strain on the various life forms and biomes where launches take place. Right around the rocket launch site, local ecosystems are affected by explosive emissions, acoustic oscillations, and land and water use for installation. Meanwhile, the exhaust from rocket boosters and the shuttle cloud itself can cause local damage to vegetation. Fuel spills, chemical leaks, intense noise levels, and acid deposition all lead to loss of local biodiversity — but local in this case means up to 45 km (28 miles) from the launch site. The authors of the Communications Earth and Environment paper cite, for example, research showing hydrochloric acid emitted from solid rocket launches killing fish after it leached into nearby water. They note that over 62% of operating sites are located within or close to protected natural areas. Falling debris from separating rocket parts extends the affected area to encompass 400 to 1,500 km (249 to 932 miles) from the actual launch site. That's of course not including emissions that become part of the atmosphere and circulate around the globe. And a rocket that blows up can shed debris over huge areas of ocean or land, as demonstrated by a SpaceX test launch that exploded early in March, raining debris over the Caribbean Sea and grounding flights around the globe. So far, most efforts to reduce all these effects and their growing impact involves voluntary mitigations, not significant regulation. The main and in fact only legal framework for international space law is the U.N.'s Outer Space Treaty. Article IX states that: 'States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extra-terrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.' Two or three problems become evident here. For one thing, this treaty refers to states. Not corporations, not individual billionaires, just states. "The Outer Space Treaty was really intended to apply to governments," Lowenthal said. "And I don't think the writers of the OST foresaw what we have today, which is essentially something akin to a gold rush or the discovery of oil or the building up of the railroads: tremendous infusion of investment by private interests, also by governments, to help promote the development of a new industry that is seen as potentially an economic driver." Writing in Northwestern Journal of Law and Policy in 2023, Yuree Nam said that "the space industry and governments have shifted focus away from preventing mass destruction in space. Instead, the space industry is now concerned with private actors commercializing spaceflight and private companies trying to develop commercial activity on Earth and in outer space." There is other relevant legislation and policy in addition to international space law, of course. But as well as sharing Lowenthal's concerns with the inadequacy of the OST to address the current reality, Nam argues that domestic regulation in the U.S., under the Federal Aviation Administration, is also not up to the job. Though the agency provides licenses to private space companies wishing to launch rockets, environmental review is only a small part of the permitting process. (Satellites being burned up in the atmosphere after five years in orbit is a requirement of FAA licenses under American law.) Satellites in orbit communicate down to ground stations using radio signals regulated by the Federal Communication Commission. Of course, under the new administration it is possible that much of this will be reorganized. Lowenthal says that an Office of Space Commerce may take over some of the regulatory role of both the FAA and the FCC; all this remains to be seen. Inadequacy for dealing with private companies is one problem. Another is that the language of the OST refers to avoiding contamination of the moon and other celestial bodies, as well as adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of stuff from space. It doesn't refer specifically to all of the issues posed by satellites, including contamination by light, which comes from light-emitting sources on Earth or else from the sun. The sun isn't to blame for light pollution that brightens the night sky, though — we are. A third potential problem with the language and scope envisioned by the OST is that it doesn't define a geography that captures the creation of light pollution in the night sky, wherever that is exactly, from the perspective of organisms on Earth. "We think of light pollution as a local issue, and we are lacking a domestic light pollution strategy or a national light pollution policy at present," Venkatesan said. "But even though light pollution can be a local issue, its effects are global." Not just global, but exponential: the issue of brightening skies, and the other problems of satellites, are both global and growing far more quickly than responses to them in the form of policies, regulations or laws, not to mention monitoring and oversight. "The challenge with quite so many satellites up there isn't just the changing [atmospheric] chemistry, the sheer numbers, the sheer pace at which they're being launched," noted Venkatesan. "It's that it's happening in parallel with the unchecked firing of a lot of branches of federal agencies that are keeping track of this." One of the early DOGE layoffs, Venkatesan added, was at NOAA, and involved staff that oversee the traffic coordination system for managing space traffic. Another was in the commercial remote sensing regulatory affairs division, affecting the staff responsible for oversight of remote sensing from space that allows us to understand the scale of the problem of light pollution down on Earth. "We are not fundamentally opposed to the development of space," Barentine told Salon. "What we are concerned about is the way that it's proceeding."
Forbes
02-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
FCC Under Trump Creates More Questions Than Answers For Media
UKRAINE - 2021/11/25: In this photo illustration, U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seal ... More is seen on a smartphone screen with the US flag in the background. (Photo Illustration by Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) I doubt too many of my media brethren paid a lot of attention to the Federal Communications Commission in the last four years. And with the flood of tumultuous changes throughout the federal government, you might still not be focused on the FCC – but you need to. Whether you are a legacy broadcasting or cable company, a broadband provider, or Big Tech, you're likely to have a lot more questions than answers about what the new FCC will mean for your business in the next four years. You might well have expected – or still expect - the Trump FCC 2.0 to deliver a massive deregulatory blitz. For those with long memories (or good Googling skills), you might have anticipated a stripping away of legacy regulations akin to what took place under the Reagan Administration-era FCC. Reagan-era FCC Chairman Mark Fowler famously quipped that 'TV is just a toaster with pictures,' and the Commission dramatically curtailed significant long-standing regulations of the broadcasting business. It eliminated the Fairness Doctrine leading to the explosion of partisan talk radio, financial syndication ('fin-syn') rules that protected the market for independent TV producers, relaxed the limits on the concentration of TV station ownership, and facilitated Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the TV stations that became the foundation of the Fox network. Pretty major stuff. On the surface, you might think the Trump-era FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, is of the same type of regulatory slashing mindset. The Commission issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking entitled In Re: Delete, Delete, Delete – no you can't make this stuff up – inviting unlimited comments on "every rule, regulation or guidance document that the FCC should eliminate.' This is the ultimate spray and pray (de)regulatory approach, but at least according to DC insiders I spoke with, it isn't clear what specific deregulatory agenda is at work in that proceeding. The FCC also recently relaxed longstanding rules requiring maintenance and operation of copper wire telecom infrastructure, but here too we can't say this is yet reflective of some broader effort to deregulate the mobile and wireline phone businesses. For years, conservatives railed against the 'public interest' standard of the Communications Act of 1934 being used to justify broad and activist FCC actions in areas such as the Fairness Doctrine, children's TV programming, cable and satellite programming regulations and net neutrality. Yet now we have an FCC Chairman employing as broad a definition of 'public interest' as we've ever seen. Rather than reflecting a consistent deregulatory agenda, the initial indicators under the Trump-driven FCC actually suggest a selective but energized hands-on rather than hands-off approach to media and communications regulation. It just happens to be a vastly different set of hands operating than we've seen before. The Commission has directly initiated investigations of DEI practices at Comcast and Disney, suggesting that their practices may violate equal employment opportunity commission rules. Putting aside the irony of aggressive EEOC enforcement by a Trump Administration agency, the one thing you can't call these actions is deregulatory. The Carr FCC isn't making a move to limit its authority to regulate media companies – quite the contrary. This is activist government in action, adding a new arrow to its quiver of arrows to sling at media opponents. Remember when after the election so many thought, and some like Warner Bros. Discovery's David Zaslav hoped out loud, that it was going to be a media dealapalooza? But according to a recent statement from Chairman Carr, when it comes to approving media and communications mergers, 'if there's businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really don't see a path forward where the FCC could reach the conclusion that approving the transaction is going to be in the public interest." This should put a chill down the spine of companies with deals in the pipeline such as Skydance and Paramount Global, as well as T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular, not to mention the lengthy list of companies who had been expecting to pass 'Go' quite easily with a Trump FCC. Upon appointing Chairman Carr, Trump called him a 'warrior for free speech.' Yet we now have the FCC actively investigating CBS over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, claiming that its editing represents a 'news distortion.' This is of course all the more dangerous when you realize that Paramount Global is depending upon the FCC to eventually approve of its merger with Skydance. If you get into selective enforcement of news organizations with parent companies that have a host of business before the federal government, it's hard to see where this ends. The CBS action has even raised the ire of a coalition of politically conservative advocacy organizations, including The Center for Individual Freedom, Americans for Tax Reform, and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which recently implored the Commission to drop its CBS investigation. This isn't about right vs. left here. Trump was certainly right to call Carr a 'warrior' but what happened to the 'free speech' part? If you have a Trump FCC that loosens rather than tightens the meaning of 'public interest,' the potential for regulatory uncertainty grows exponentially. Despite strong constituencies for deregulation from the industries involved, regulations such as ownership concentration, and enforcement of regulations on programming negotiations, retransmission consent and must carry and even compliance with the limited content-related rules on the books are all fair game for an activist 'let's make a deal' regulatory approach. Earlier in my career as a General Counsel, my boss would always ask in a dispute which side had the better legal argument. Today the answer to such a question would be merely one data point among many where mischievous and politicized enforcement appears to rule the day. As someone who teaches a graduate-level course in media dealmaking and negotiation, I'm afraid that skillset, well beyond a careful legal interpretation, has never been more desperately needed by a host of media and communications industry players at the mercy of government regulatory whims.
