NAB TO FCC: SATCASTER MERGER NOT IN PUBLIC INTEREST Jeffrey Yorke – Radio and Records Jim Bohannon and Tom Joyner both tell their audiences that they are the "hardest-working" guys in radio. And both are. But someone has to wonder if the lawyers at the NAB aren't the hardest-working legal eagles on the planet.
In yet another filing with the FCC, NAB lawyers Marsha MacBride, Jane Mago and Larry Walke, along with help from former FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief David Solomon of Wilkinson Barker Knauer, LLP, slapped down Sirius and XM's proposed a la carte programming and pricing menu while reminding the FCC a merger would violate the FCC's own original rule of one operator owning both satellite licenses.
"Between them, they control all of the spectrum assigned for such service," the NAB says in the Monday (Aug. 13) filing. "The applicants have offered no evidence or rational sufficient to justify a commission decision to repudiate this spectrum policy and change the anti-merger rule in order to facilitate the proposed merger."
The filing calls the a la carte proposal "a series of new, non-binding pricing and programming offerings, which they may change at any time and which offer few, if any, true benefits to existing subscribers."
In their five-page submission, the NAB lawyers argue that the satcasters have failed to show that their promised new offerings will come as a direct result of a merger and claim that, up until now, neither Sirius or XM had done much to produce an interoperable receiver and do so now only if their union is approved. "In short, there is no basis from the commission to conclude that the proposed merger would serve the public interest and thus eliminate the satellite DARS anti-merger rule." |