Just days before the finalizing of the acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Charter Communications, customers in Central New York were a week away from the completion of Time Warner Cable’s Maxx upgrade program targeting Syracuse and other communities in the region. But once Charter took over, all upgrades were put on hold, leaving some customers with Maxx speeds of 300Mbps while others languished with top speeds of 50Mbps.

Good news for those customers, at least. In a communication with the New York State Public Service Commission, Charter told regulators it intends to focus its efforts on completing those upgrades over the course of 2017. In fact, it will likely be the only region of New York targeted for speed upgrades of up to 300Mbps this year. For other upstate cities including Buffalo, Rochester, and Binghamton, Charter has upgraded its top speed to 100Mbps for those willing to pay approximately $105 a month and a one-time upgrade fee of $199.

Sometime this year, those New York communities still not able to buy 300Mbps will commence a full transition to all digital and encrypted cable television service, a prerequisite for the faster broadband speeds. Charter has a deadline of 2019 to introduce up to 300Mbps service across all areas it services in New York State. The company seems to hint it will achieve that well before the deadline, which likely means sometime in 2018.

In February, the cable company also reported it had completed building out new service to an additional 2,860 homes across 49 counties and approximately 250 municipalities. But the company is committed to expanding service to approximately 145,000 New York households, which means it has a long way to go. This week, Charter formally applied for an extension of the deadline, blaming utility pole owners for taking too long to “make-ready” utility poles for cable service and admitting it will fall short of regulator expectations.

The areas where Charter has most recently managed to complete expanded service areas include:

• Albany County for approximately 281 passings, including the Village of Menands, Towns of Colonie, Bethlehem, and New Scotland, and the City of Albany.
• Erie County for approximately 336 passings, including areas such as the Towns of Amherst, Boston, Orchard Park, Derby, and the City of Buffalo.
• Kings County for approximately 285 passings in Brooklyn.
• New York County for approximately 553 passings in the City of New York.
• Saratoga County for approximately 373 passings, including the Towns of Milton, Northumberland, Stillwater, Clifton Park, Ballston Lake, Halfmoon, and Wilton, and the City of Saratoga Springs.
• Sullivan County for approximately 84 passings, including the Towns of Fallsburg, Liberty, Victor, Thompson, and the Village of Woodridge.
• Ulster County for approximately 143 passings, including the Towns of Rochester, Ulster, and Saugerties, and the City of Kingston.
• Wayne County for approximately 78 passings, including the Towns of Macedon, Walworth, Newark, and Williamson.

AT&T has spent the last several years laying the foundation to pull the plug on its wired legacy landline service.

In preparation for a transition away from Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), AT&T is notifying customers of a change to the residential service agreement governing home phone service. The company has added a new section entitled “Network Changes” that gives AT&T the right to temporarily suspend landline service to replace it either with AT&T’s U-verse “Voice over IP” service which may also be called as VoIP Phone Systems, or a wireless home phone alternative. In addition, businesses that need proactive call answering strategies to improve customer retention may consider getting help from professional services like Onwards Answering. The agreement requires customers to accept the transition, allow technicians to enter the customer’s home to install new equipment, and permits AT&T to use the customer’s electricity to power that equipment. If a customer refuses to grant entry, AT&T can permanently disconnect your landline phone service without recourse.

Similar contract language was introduced in other areas where wireless home phone equipment was intended to replace traditional landline service in areas where a local phone company chose not to repair or upgrade its facilities. AT&T intends to enforce the agreement in areas where it serves as the local landline phone company.

d. Network Changes.

AT&T reserves the right at any time to temporarily suspend or interrupt Services to make necessary changes in how we provide Services to your premises. We will provide advance notice of these network changes to the extent required by this Agreement, applicable law, and regulation. In some cases, such changes in how we provide Services may require a technician to be dispatched to your home to install new network equipment at your premises and transfer your service to the new network equipment in order to ensure you continue to receive such Services. The network equipment we install at your home may require the use of your electrical power for the operation of our facilities. Where a technician visit is required, if you do not allow AT&T to install the new network equipment at your premises, your telephone service may be disconnected in compliance with subsection (b) above.

(Image courtesy: “Ramsaso” of Houston, Tex.)

O’Rielly

Republican FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly wants the FCC to prohibit states from attempting an end run around the current majority’s broad-based deregulation of ISPs, likening it to a war of socialist forces vs. free market capitalism.

Speaking at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Spring Task Force Summit Annual Summit in Charlotte, N.C. on May 5, O’Rielly made it clear he intends to stop states from writing broadband privacy rules to replace those killed by the Republican majority in Congress and also wants to restrict states from enacting new rules impacting Voice over IP and broadband. O’Rielly told the audience he had already spoken to Chairman Ajit Pai about his ideas, potentially giving his agenda a majority vote on the Commission. Currently, the FCC has just three commissioners – Ajit Pai, Mike O’Rielly, and Democrat Mignon Clyburn.

In earlier remarks, Pai rejected allowing states to make their own decisions about broadband privacy policies.

“It is both impractical and very harmful for each state to enact differing and conflicting privacy burdens on broadband providers, many of which serve multiple states, if not the entire country,” said Pai. “If necessary, the FCC should be willing to issue the requisite decision to clarify the jurisdictional aspects of this issue.”

FCC action could potentially pre-empt any state laws from at least 10 states that have either passed ISP privacy laws or are planning to.

O’Rielly declared he intends to move broadband regulation away from the agenda favored by the Obama Administration’s FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler and return to hands-off policies allowing cable and phone companies to manage their businesses without government interference. O’Rielly told a cheering audience at the corporate-funded conference that under Chairman Pai’s watch, the FCC will return to “its previous approach to broadband that enabled staggering innovation, creativity, competition, disruption and consumer benefit.”

O’Rielly characterized groups fighting for consumer legislation banning zero rating/data caps, rate regulation, oversight, and consumer protection laws as part of a nefarious “progressive agenda to vanquish capitalism and economic liberty.” Like ALEC, O’Rielly claimed, the FCC has been unfairly attacked by progressive groups that call out both Chairman Pai’s agenda at the FCC and ALEC itself for ghostwritten legislation actually written by large corporate interests and passed for their welfare.

“Like ALEC, the new commission is facing its share of unwarranted and inappropriate criticism,” O’Rielly complained.

O’Rielly’s speech declared war on three hot issues broadband companies and consumers are concerned with: Net Neutrality, community-owned broadband networks, and state regulators seen as meddling with the free market.

• Net Neutrality: “All of the propaganda in the world cannot paper over the fact that these new burdens were not in response to actual marketplace events but hypothetical concerns dreamed up by radical activists.”
• Regulation of Voice over IP Phone Service in Minnesota to assure quality of service: “Such inappropriate jurisdictional overreaches by states should be nipped in the bud.”
• Municipal Broadband: “It would be easy, as some have done, to blindly support any means necessary to get more and faster broadband to people they represent.”

O’Rielly sought a tighter partnership with ALEC to stop consumer groups from enacting new laws that protect an open internet:

“The members of ALEC can serve an important role as the new Commission seeks to restore free market principles to broadband offerings. Many of you know all too well of the pressure on us to buckle and acquiesce to the whims of the misinformed screaming for Net Neutrality. You likely face it at your respective statehouses as you debate the various matters before you. The ‘progressive agenda’ being pushed in so many settings is really an effort to use government as a means to redistribute hard earned assets from one group of people to favored interests. Do not let your voices go unheard as Net Neutrality advocates slowly, but surely, seek to drag the U.S. economy toward socialism.”

On municipal broadband, O’Rielly stretched his premise into a comparison of communities that want to have the ability to build their own networks with past offers of discounted heating oil from former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, suggesting good deeds on the surface may lead to unintended consequences later on.

Byron is on ALEC’s Communications and Technology Task Force

O’Rielly has also been infuriated with Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission, which has been sparring with Charter Communications over its cable “digital phone” service in the U.S. District Court in St. Paul.

In March 2013, Charter Fiberlink Companies transferred 100,000 Minnesota customers to “an affiliate, Charter Advanced Services Companies, which provided VoIP phone service that was not certified” by the PUC, the Commerce Department said.

Better known as Spectrum Voice, Charter’s VoIP service had failed to collect any fees to support the state’s Telecommunications Access Minnesota program, which provides equipment for hearing-impaired and blind consumers who use the Minnesota Relay Service. Charter also refused to credit low-income consumers who would otherwise qualify for Lifeline phone service at discounted rates.

If the court determined VoIP was a “telecommunications service,” Minnesota regulators could force Charter to comply with state law. If determined to be an “information service,” federal rules exempting Charter would apply.

The week after O’Rielly delivered his speech a Minnesota federal charge ruled in favor of Charter and against the state regulator.

U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson relied on arcane terminology that lets Charter avoid state regulation:

“The court agrees with Charter Advanced that Spectrum Voice engages in net protocol conversion, and that this feature renders it an ‘information service’ under applicable legal and administrative precedent,” according to the opinion. Although Judge Nelson agreed that “the frank purpose” behind Charter’s customer shuffling was to “limit the reach of state regulation, thereby enhancing Charter’s market competitiveness,” she said the service fit the qualifications of an information service.

“The touchstone of the information services inquiry is whether Spectrum Voice acts on the customer’s information — here a phone call — in such a way as to ‘transform’ that information,” the opinion said.

Regardless of the judge’s decision, O’Rielly wants to prevent a recurrence of state regulator interference in the cable industry’s phone business.

“The commission should have just declared VoIP to be an interstate information service,” O’Rielly told the audience. “Arguably, VoIP is just an application not even subject to FCC jurisdiction much less that of individual states.”

In one of the largest media consolidation acquisitions in history, Sinclair Broadcast Group has agreed to buy Tribune Media and its 42 TV stations in a $3.9 billion deal.

The transaction, expected to win easy approval by the Republican-dominated Federal Communications Commission, will virtually guarantee cable and satellite TV subscribers will pay significantly higher prices to watch Sinclair’s local television stations covering more than 70% of the United States.

Sinclair helped lay the foundation for winning approval of the transaction in GOP-dominated D.C. by hiring former Trump spokesman Boris Epshteyn as Sinclair’s chief political analyst, and Sinclair executives mandate that many of its owned stations air pro-Trump conservative political content labeled as “news stories” as part of local newscasts.

Sinclair’s conservative leanings and accusations of hypocrisy are nothing new for the station group, which has been mired in controversy for more than two decades. The “family values” image that Sinclair purports to have in its political commentaries and corporate image ran headlong into the 1996 arrest of its former CEO David Smith, who used the company Mercedes to pick up hookers in Baltimore. He was convicted of a misdemeanor sex offense. Smith cut a deal with a Maryland state’s attorney that would allow him to avoid picking up trash on the highway or cleaning community-owned pools by having his reporters air stories about Baltimore’s drug court instead.

LuAnne Canipe, a reporter who worked on air at Sinclair’s flagship station, WBFF in Baltimore, from 1994 to 1998, told Salon in 2004 she took a phone call one day about the disposition of Smith’s arrest.

“A Baltimore judge called me up,” she recalls. “He wasn’t handling the case, but he called to tell me about the arrangement and asked me if I knew about it. The judge was outraged. He said, ‘How can employees do community service for their boss?’”

To this day, Smith remains the chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, although he relinquished the CEO position last fall.

Canipe said the sexual shenanigans at Sinclair didn’t stop with the CEO either.

“Let’s just say the arrest of the CEO was part of a sexual atmosphere that trickled down to different levels in the company,” Canipe remembered. “There was an improper work environment. I think that because of what he did there was a feeling that everything was fair game.”

Before leaving Sinclair in 1998, she said she once complained to management about another Sinclair employee, who had engaged in audible phone sex inside a station conference room, but that no action was taken against the employee. Canipe passed away in 2016 after battling cancer.

Sinclair stations were required to air political commentary during local newscasts that favored the Bush Administration.

By 2004, the majority of Sinclair’s then-62 stations were living with corporate interference in the local newsroom. Sinclair mandates that most of their owned stations air corporate-produced political segments that are routinely called “to the [political] right of Fox News” by detractors. That year, many local newsrooms at Sinclair stations bristled over the mandatory airing of a daily televised commentary called The Point, hosted by Mark Hyman, then Sinclair’s vice president for corporate relations. The Point could be compared as Sean Hannity’s talking points delivered with the bombastic panache of Bill O’Reilly. As the 2004 election neared, Hyman’s push for George W. Bush’s re-election went into overdrive. Hyman was a fierce advocate for the Bush Administration’s intervention in Iraq and referred to the French critics of President Bush’s war strategy as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

While Hyman force-fed conservative political commentaries to Sinclair stations, he did not extend that same right to others, banning Sinclair’s ABC-affiliated stations from airing an edition of Nightline that showed host Ted Koppel reading the names of U.S. troops killed in Iraq, claiming the idea was inappropriate and “motivated by a political agenda.” Concerns about political agendas were short-lived, however, because Hyman later mandated that 40 of Sinclair’s 62 stations air “Stolen Honor,” a much-criticized and highly controversial political documentary attacking Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry’s war record. The stations aired a revised version of the documentary days before the 2004 presidential election.

When management at some of Sinclair’s local stations balked at the required airing, Hyman accused them of “acting like Holocaust deniers.”

Just prior to the 2012 election, WSYX was forced to air a Sinclair-produced “special” pre-empting ABC’s 6:30pm national news and Nightline that heavily criticized President Obama, then up for re-election, and accused him of lying about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The special also pre-empted programming on other Sinclair stations, including WPEC in West Palm Beach.

The implied quid pro quo with the Bush Administration was particularly important for Sinclair as it continued acquiring TV stations, a process that required the approval of the then-Republican controlled FCC. A 2004 Salon article quoted journalist Paul Alexander, who produced a widely acclaimed documentary about Kerry as “insulting to the news-gathering process. That’s not how you gather news; that’s how you blackmail people.”

But news gathering was never the point, according to former Sinclair reporter Canipe. “David Smith doesn’t care about journalism,” she said.

Smith doubled-down on his cozy relationship with the Bush Administration by allowing conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to produce unfettered extended media segments for Sinclair stations. What Smith claims he did not know was that Williams accepted a $240,000 payoff from Bush officials to promote the Administration’s education agenda in the media. Williams brazenly interviewed then Education Secretary Rod Paige, the same man who authorized Williams’ payoff.

The result of the interview, according to the 2005 Rolling Stone piece:

Even before the payoffs became public, the news staff at Sinclair was horrified. The producer who edited the interview Williams did with Paige calls it “the worst piece of TV I’ve ever been associated with. You’ve seen softballs from Larry King? Well, this was softer. I told my boss it didn’t even deserve to be broadcast, but they kept pushing me to put more of it on tape. In retrospect, it was so clearly propaganda.”

When things became politically difficult for the president during the second term of the Bush Administration, Sinclair again came to the rescue, forcing its stations to air headquarter-produced news stories highlighting “good news” about the war in Iraq. Sinclair executives also demanded each of its 62 stations air a pledge of support for President Bush.

Rolling Stone:

But within the company, current and former employees have long known that there is a fine line between ideology and coercion. Jon Leiberman, once Sinclair’s Washington bureau chief, says Smith and other executives were intent on airing “propaganda meant to sway the election.” An ex-producer says he was ordered not to report “any bad news out of Iraq — no dead servicemen, no reports on how much we’re spending, nothing.” And a producer Sinclair sent to Iraq to report on the war calls the resulting coverage “pro-Bush.”

“You weren’t reporting news,” says the producer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “You were reporting a political agenda that came down to you from the top of the food chain.”

At the time, Smith told visitors to his Baltimore headquarters: “There are two companies doing truly balanced news today: Sinclair and Fox.”

During the most recent election cycle, Sinclair executives made sure audiences knew where they stood, urging voters to reject Hillary Clinton, as the New York Times reported, “because the Democratic Party was historically pro-slavery.”

More recently, Sinclair has defended the Trump Administration, with orders from Sinclair HQ to stations to dig up information about an online ad that seemed to recruit paid protesters for President Trump’s inauguration in January. Various right-wing groups used the ad as evidence of organized efforts to harass the incoming administration. The ad was later determined to be a hoax, wasting reporters’ time.

The national map of Sinclair and Tribune Media’s reach. (Image: New York Times)

The interference in local newsgathering by Sinclair executives has become so pervasive, its station in Seattle – KOMO, has been rebelling by burying mandated stories surrounding commercial breaks, when viewers are most likely to tune them out. But there is little else the station can do, and like with other acquisitions Sinclair has completed, there are fewer news staffers at KOMO to protest. Standard procedure at Sinclair after an acquisition to is dramatically cut back on employees and offer more stories and content produced at Sinclair’s headquarters or at other Sinclair-owned stations.

Sinclair’s latest target — Tribune Media, owns stations familiar to most cable and satellite subscribers around the country. Among the stations in Tribune’s portfolio — WPIX-New York, WPHL-Philadelphia, WGN-TV/WGN America-Chicago, KDVR/KWGN-Denver, and KTLA-Los Angeles.

“It’s an incredible amount of power in one company’s hands,” said Craig Aaron, president of Free Press.

Tribune Media owns some of the largest local TV stations in the country.

Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps doesn’t much like the deal either, noting it is “another blow to the diversity of journalism that we should have. It’s symptomatic of what is happening in this market, which is fewer and fewer organizations controlling more and more of the information on which our democracy rests.”

Copps

With all the recent turmoil at Fox News Channel, including the cancellation of Bill O’Reilly’s show, Sinclair could use its Tribune Media acquisition to launch a new conservative national news and opinion network that could rival Fox. WGN America, which no longer has anything to do with WGN-TV — a former “superstation”, could dump the current reruns it airs and be repurposed as a new home for exiled conservative commentators like O’Reilly.

Regardless of your political persuasion, you will likely be paying a lot more for Sinclair TV stations on the cable or satellite dial. Sinclair is among the most aggressive station owners boosting prices for carriage agreements. Cable operators will continue to pass most, if not all of these fees on to subscribers in the form of higher rates or through “Broadcast TV” surcharges that are rarely mentioned by cable companies in their advertised rates.

In Utah, cable operators are already very familiar with Sinclair’s retransmission rate increases. The revenue has grown so significant, some station owner groups are buying up small independent TV stations just to cash in on the growing revenue they get from cable systems and subscribers.

CentraCom, a cable operator in Utah, reports it now pays over $10 as month for local stations, per subscriber, double what it paid in 2008, and they are prepared to see rates much higher than that in the future. Sinclair will also be motivated to force bundle its cable network Tennis Channel with its local stations when it negotiates with cable companies, whether they want the tennis network or not.

John Oliver returns to defend Net Neutrality, and provide a simpler way for ordinary Americans to share their views with the FCC.

John Oliver is back.

As Donald Trump’s FCC chairman Ajit Pai lays the groundwork for an all-out repeat of Net Neutrality, Oliver spent 20 minutes of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight” this past weekend pleading for Americans to come out and protect a free and open internet, just as he did three years earlier.

“It seems that the Trump-era will basically Ctrl-Z everything that happened on Obama’s watch,” Oliver said. “I genuinely would not be surprised if one night Trump went on TV just to tell us he personally killed every turkey Obama ever pardoned.”

“Every internet group needs to come together like you successfully did three years ago,” Oliver told his audience. “Gamers, YouTube celebrities, Instagram models, Tom from MySpace — if you’re still alive. We need all of you. You cannot say you are too busy when 540,000 of you commented on Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement.”

To help ordinary Americans navigate the FCC’s arcane electronic comments filing system, Oliver launched GoFCCYourself.com, a website dedicated to getting comments about Net Neutrality registered with the FCC.

His viewers responded, and promptly crashed the FCC’s website with an overwhelming amount of traffic. The same thing happened in 2014 when Oliver’s public plea helped produce millions of comments in favor of Net Neutrality. As of this afternoon, the FCC website is still slower than usual and the likely deluge of comments will keep FCC staffers busy for weeks to come.

Oliver took direct aim at Pai, noting the former Verizon lawyer said he would take a weed whacker to telecom regulations and has already threatened that Net Neutrality’s “days are numbered.”

“‘Days are numbered’ and ‘take a weed whacker’ are serial-killer talk,” Oliver said.

Oliver lampooned Pai over his repeated tweets quoting lines from the 1998 film The Big Lebowski and his oversized Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup coffee mug.

“Ajit Pai is the kind of guy who has a fun, oversized novelty mug and he is really proud of it,” Oliver said.

But despite the fun-loving façade, Pai’s claims that Net Neutrality regulations were burdensome and unnecessary are not a game to internet content providers and startups that fear large telecommunications companies could rig the marketplace against them. Pai complained at a gathering held April 26 at the Newseum, sponsored in part by FreedomWorks — a group with direct ties to the Koch Brothers, that “special interests” were pushing Net Neutrality and causing a reduction in private broadband investment.

Oliver responded that Title II enforcement was essential for Net Neutrality policies to have any teeth. Pai’s desire to return to an earlier Title I enforcement mechanism for Net Neutrality was overturned by the D.C. Court of Appeals, ruling the FCC could not enforce Net Neutrality policies under Title I, and suggested Title II enforcement instead.

Last week, that same D.C. Court of Appeals elected not to review and let stand a three-judge panel’s decision that the FCC was within its rights to reclassify ISPs under Title II, a clear victory for open internet proponents.

“[That] decision is a win for consumers,” said Lisa Hayes, general counsel for the Center For Democracy and Technology. “The court agreed that Title II classification is sound, and that the FCC has authority to regulate the marketplace. Net neutrality is essential to a vibrant internet ecosystem, and CDT will continue to defend the open internet in the days and years to come.”

“The D.C. Circuit has once again confirmed that the FCC’s Open Internet rules are lawful and supported by the evidence,” said Public Knowledge senior counsel John Bergmayer. “Now, the primary threat to these important consumer protections is FCC Chairman Pai’s determination to roll them back, and to hand more power to monopolistic internet access providers.”

ISPs like Verizon are also on record stating Net Neutrality had and will continue to have no bearing on internet investment, which directly contradicts Pai’s repeated claims.

“Maybe the best way to gauge Title II’s impact is to listen to what cable companies told their own investors, to who they are legally obligated to tell the truth,” Oliver said, playing a recording of a 2014 Verizon earnings conference call quoting former chief financial officer Fran Shammo who told investors that Net Neutrality “does not influence the way we invest.”

John Oliver takes on FCC chairman Ajit Pai in Net Neutrality II from his HBO series “Last Week Tonight.” (19:32)