FCC Seeks Info From Third Party Companies for Comcast/TWC Review
The FCC wants information from some companies that deal with Comcast or provide similar services in order to complete its review of the cable giant’s proposed buy of Time Warner Cable, said letters posted online in docket 14-57 Monday. To complete its review, the FCC requires “information and data from other commercial wireline carriers against which the applicants compete,” said the letters to DirecTV, HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Sony Network Entertainment International and to network providers Limelight Networks, Level 3 Communications and Akamai Technologies. Though information requests to third parties are unusual in merger reviews, they aren’t in reviews of this scale, several communications attorneys told us. The focus on companies that provide content or deliver content-containing data suggests that the inquiry could be connected to the peering dispute between Netflix and Comcast last year, one cable attorney told us.
The FCC may also be trying to get a more complete picture of Comcast’s position in the broadband Internet market, said Public Knowledge Senior Staff Attorney John Bergmayer. The deals between companies like Level 3 and Comcast are simply the broadband version of the deals between Comcast and programmers like Viacom, Bergmayer said, and the FCC is seeking that information in the same way it sought Video Programming Confidential Information about the programming and retrans markets. “In both cases Comcast is in a privileged position -- there’s the same issue of Comcast having leverage because it has so many users,” he said.
The FCC declined specific comment, but a spokesman told us such information requests are a routine process, and the letters were sent out Dec. 23 and 31. The letters give most of the companies a Jan. 23 deadline to provide the requested information, though DirecTV has until Jan. 30. The timing of the requests doesn’t shed any light on where the FCC is in the review process, several attorneys told us, and the commission declined to comment on the timing of the review. Comcast, Limelight and Netflix also didn’t comment.
The information requests contain lists of detailed questions seeking information about the recipients' dealings with other companies. Akamai was asked for information about which ISPs get most of its traffic, and the amount of money involved in its interconnection agreements. The FCC asked HBO for data-use information about its HBO Go service, and strategic plans for the online video service and “documents that discuss the actual or potential effects on the Company’s OVD service from the introduction of data caps [and] usage based billing plans."
The FCC’s formal request for the information doesn’t mean the companies involved don’t want to share the information, Bergmayer said. But since such data may be protected by confidentiality rules, the formal request from the FCC allows the companies to share the data without running afoul of rules barring them from sharing it, he said.