ITV1 is to remain bound by restrictions on how it can sell advertising airtime, the UK Competition Commission has ruled – but it added that the mechanism should be dropped at some point and that the entire UK TV ad sales market needs a review. The commission stood by its provisional decision in September to […]
Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, said at NCTA he was not concerned about increased regulation from the Federal Communications Commission, which is seeking new authority to regulate cable and telecoms groups. The FCC is seeking to impose tougher regulations on high-speed Internet providers to guarantee that all content creators would be treated equally over […]
The FCC considers broadband service a sort of hybrid between an information service and a utility and that it has sufficient power to regulate Internet traffic under existing law, despite recent court cases that say it doesn't. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC had exceeded its authority by telling Comcast the […]
Dutch ISP Ziggo, the country's largest, is facing court action for its refusal to block subscriber access to Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. It insists that it's simply a conduit to the Internet and shouldn't be forced to filter the results, especially considering there's no legal basis for such a request. “We are […]
BSkyB and Ofcom have reached an interim agreement on how to handle the period of Sky's appeal to the Competition Appeals Tribunal for Ofcom's wholesale price regulation order to be suspended. In essence, the terms of the WMO (Wholesale Must Offer) order are narrowed to specify, for now, the beneficiaries of lower prices as BT, […]
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has latched on to the disruptive technology formed when DLNA is combined with DTCP-IP and a form of high-bandwidth no-new-wire networking, and seems determined to use the opportunity to mandate the end of the pay-TV digital STB. The Commission wants to allow any CE manufacturer's devices to access pay-TV […]
The BBC is cracking down on re-streamers of its iPlayer services like TVCatchUp and Zattoo. "We took them [BBC channels] down and they will remain down and we will link to the iPlayer instead," CEO of Zattoo Beat Knecht told the Guardian. "This is to comply with a request of theirs; and it frees us […]
The UK privacy watchdog has joined nine other countries to push Google to adopt stricter privacy controls. Christopher Graham, the UK’s information commissioner, has joined countries including Germany, Canada and Spain in signing a letter challenging Google to protect its users more. The commissioner claimed the concerns of citizens across the world were “being forgotten” […]
The High Court in Dublin has ruled that an agreement between the Irish music industry and the country’s ISPs to address online piracy does not violate data protection laws. The ruling lays the foundations for the introduction of new graduated response measures to stem file sharing in Ireland. The High Court’s ruling considered the terms […]
The English Premier League is to challenge the decision by media regulator Ofcom to force pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB to sell its sports content to rivals at a reduced rate. The Premier League said it had decided to resist strenuously the ruling which it said would reduce the incentive for all broadcasters to invest in the […]