Court Stays FCC Merger Contract Decision

Third parties will not gain access to program contracts in the Comcast/Time Warner Cable and AT&T/DirecTV deals, at least not until a federal court reviews the underlying arguments against doing so.

In a one-page decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Friday granted a stay of the FCC's decision to make those documents available to hundreds of outside parties subject to protective orders the FCC said were sufficient to protect that info given the public interest in making them available.

The court said petitioners, which included CBS, Fox, and others, had satisfied the requirements for the stay, which means it concluded they had a good chance of winning and would be harmed absent the stay.

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John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.