Broadcast Groups Push for Foreign Content ID Stay

The “extraordinary reach” and “sheer pointlessness” of FCC foreign-sponsored content disclosure rules violates the First Amendment, said NAB, the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters and the Multimedia, Telecom and Internet Council in support of the groups’ stay request (see 2201040057) before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in docket 21-1171. “The Order applies to every lease, even infomercials and church-service broadcasts,” the groups said Monday: “The object of the mandatory investigation is to redress a phantom harm never known to occur.” The FCC's filing cited examples of foreign entities leasing broadcast time, but those entities weren’t registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the groups said. If the broadcaster investigation determines that an unregistered foreign entity controls the leasing entity, the information needed for the required broadcast identifications of the foreign entity won’t be in the database, they said. The requirements are unreasonable and are outside the agency’s authority, the groups said. There were "multiple narrower alternatives that would have burdened significantly less speech.”