NCTA Applauds House Bill To Repeal 70/70 Test

McSlarrow Writers Letter to Rep. Blackburn

By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 12/6/2007 3:23:00 PM

Washington – National Cable & Telecommunications Association president Kyle McSlarrow on Thursday praised the introduction of a bill that would repeal a law that Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin tried to use to hammer cable with new regulations, perhaps including a la carte requirements.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), would repeal the so-called 70/70 test, which gives the FCC authority “promulgate any additional rules necessary to provide diversity of information sources.” But the agency first has to find that cable operators with 36 channels pass 70% of households and 70% of subscribers passed by such systems subscribe.

Last Tuesday, Martin tried to force the FCC to agree that the 70/70 test had been met, but he had to retreat when an FCC majority refused to accept the honesty of his presentation or the reliability of his data.

“With the recent attempt to manipulate data in order to reach the 70/70 threshold and to interpret a narrow grant of authority broadly in ways never foreseen by Congress, it is

completely appropriate that Congress repeal this antiquated provision,” McSlarrow said in a letter to Blackburn.

Blackburn introduced the bipartisan bill with Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-NY). The measure would repeal section 612(g) of the Communications Act, which was added in 1984 as part of the Cable Communications Policy Act.

“Like the black and white television, beta-max video-recorder, and the telegraph of yester-year, it is time to retire the FCC’s ‘70/70’ authority under current law. The current chairman's recent decision to unearth this statutory relic from 1984 calls into question whether the ‘70/70’ rule is relevant in today's modern, highly competitive world of subscription television,” Blackburn said in a statement.