Bloomberg LP submitted a letter and motion Friday to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to end Comcast’s refusal to implement a key condition it agreed to in order to receive the FCC’s approval of its acquisition of NBC Universal.
NBC Universial is the parent company of CNBC, and Bloomberg would like its television station to be placed next to its rival on Comcast cable networks.
“Unfortunately, Comcast made it clear to me that it had no interest in discussing implementation of the condition, let alone in actually implementing it, because Comcast did not believe that the FCC had required it to do anything it wasn’t already doing,” wrote Bloomberg CEO Dan Doctoroff in the letter.
“In interpreting the condition to be meaningless, Comcast has taken the position that the phrase ‘now or in the future’ actually means ‘in the future’ and that ‘a significant number or percentage’ of news channels actually refers to ‘all or a significant majority’ of news channels,” added Doctoroff.
“Additionally, while the Commission defines a ‘neighborhood’ as ‘a significant number or percentage’ of news channels, Comcast argues that whether the number or percentage of news channels is ‘significant’ should be determined by whether they are in a neighborhood. For these reasons, Bloomberg was forced to file a complaint at the Commission on June 13, 2011 in order to require Comcast to comply with the news neighborhooding condition.”
The letter states that the news neighborhooding condition is scheduled to be in effect for only seven years, and more than ten percent of that time has already passed.
