Blunt to Speak at ACA

Sen. Roy Blunt is the latest addition to the American Cable Association's Washington Summit, which will mark the group's 20th anniversary.

ACA President Matt Polka describes the junior senator from Missouri as an "unapologetic advocate for rural interests, especially with regard to government policies designed to spread broadband and other critical infrastructure into the most economically challenging areas to serve," primarily those policies that gets the government out of the way of private investment and marketplace-driven solution. ACA represents the mid-sized and smaller operators who are doing a lot of that "spreading."

Blunt, a member of the Commerce, Appropriations, Armed Services and Rules Committees, will speak March 13. he is a deregulatory Republican who teamed with former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) to propose scrapping FCC ownership regs and applying cost-benefit analysis to network neutrality rules, which he has labeled a "a massive and unnecessary overreach into an economic sector which has continued to thrive, even as the overall economy slowed."

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.