House To Hold FCC Oversight Hearing

The FCC commissioners will be seeing a lot of the Capitol next month, and not just from the windows on the eighth floor of their Portals headquarters.

The House Energy & Commerce Committee will hold a hearing March 19 with the commissioners, subcommittee chairman Greg Walden told C-SPAN's Communicators series in an interview Friday.

Look for Walden to grill them on the FCC's Feb. 26 decision to reclassify ISPs as telecoms under Title II common carrier regs.

Walden backs a bill that would block that move in favor of protecting network neutrality via more narrow authority, the bill's Republican backers argue.

The Senate Commerce Committee is already holding an oversight hearing with the commissioners March 18 to talk about network neutrality. Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) is also a backer of that bill.

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.