WASHINGTON DC – The U.S. Senate took the first serious step on Monday toward rewriting the nation’s telecommunications laws, a move that raises politically sensitive questions about digital copyright and Net neutrality and could take years to complete.
Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, released a 135-page draft bill that represents the most sweeping rewrite of laws dealing with video, satellite, and broadband communications in a decade, CNET News.Com reported.
Stevens said in a statement that the legislation grew out of more than a dozen hearings and drew on proposals from other senators as well. “It attempts to strike a balance between competing industries, consumer groups and local government,” the Alaska Republican said.
Absent from the legislation are any “Net neutrality” regulations that companies such as Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo, Intel and Microsoft have been lobbying for during the past few months. Instead of handing the Federal Communications Commission extensive powers to police violations – an idea defeated in a House of Representatives committee vote last week- the FCC would merely be required to prepare annual reports on any problems.
Net neutrality has become a rallying cry recently for Internet and software firms and liberal advocacy groups (and even one or two conservative ones) that say strict FCC regulations are necessary to protect the Internet. The idea of Net neutrality is that all Web sites and Internet packets should be treated equally.
Included in the massive proposal is, however, one requirement sure to please the recording industry: authorization for the FCC to start the process of outlawing digital over-the-air radio and digital satellite receivers sold today that permit users to record broadcasts. Those would be supplanted with receivers that will treat as copy-protected anything with an “audio broadcast flag” in the future.
Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, called it “a necessary and appropriate focus on an issue critical to record labels, songwriters, publishers, artists and many others in the music community.” The RIAA is worried about newer receivers, such as the Sirius S50, that it says let Americans assemble a personal music library without paying for it.
Stevens did seem, however, to bow to pressure from technology groups and the consumer electronics industry when devising related regulations to copy-protect digital video. His legislation would order the FCC to ban digital TV tuners, such as ElGato’s EyeTV 500, that let users record over-the-air broadcasts and save them without copy protection.
But the bill does say that Americans should enjoy the right to share recorded broadcast TV over their home networks, make “short excerpts” available over the Internet, and that news programming generally should not be flagged. Those sections are likely to draw opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America and its allies; one source close to Hollywood said that “the movie industry has real problems with the broadcast flag language as it appears in the bill.”
