Broadcasting&Cable

The Federal Communications Commission has provided a five-business-day extension for comments and reply comments on its Fourteenth Broadband Deployment report, but denied requests for a longer extension and for any extension on its request for comment on the state of fixed broadband competition.

The Content Creators Coalition has told the Federal Trade Commission that its members need government protection from big edge providers they say are abusing their dominant positions on the Web.  That came in a filing with the FTC, which is launching a broad review of its competition and consumer protection regime. It also comes as the agency is newly charged with overseeing network neutrality after the Federal Communications Commission deeded it oversight in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order.

The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau says it has no issue with the FCC's administrative law judge (ALJ) terminating a hearing into Sinclair's representations about the now-imploded Tribune deal. The FCC docket was still open. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai had recommended referring the deal to ALJ Richard Sippel, citing allegations that Sinclair had been less than candid in its representations--Sinclair flatly denied any of it--and that some TV station spin-offs could still leave it in effective control of some of those stations.

Four Democratic representatives are pressing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai for answers about the FCC's misidentification of a flood of network neutrality comments as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, specifically when he and others at the FCC found out about the inaccurate diagnosis. The Reps suggested that there were only two options: that Chairman Pai already knew it was not a DDoS attack but had not shared that information, or that he was ignorant of it, which they suggested would be "dereliction of duty."