Ofcom has confirmed that only fixed line ISPs with more than 400,000 subscribers will be forced to comply with the Digital Economy Act’s controversial anti-file sharing provisions. The communications regulator has informed the Internet Service Providers’ Association of the benchmark, and said it intends to publish rules within the next two weeks. It means mobile […]

A federal appeals court has granted Dish Network a rare, full-court (so-called 'en banc'”) review of a ruling it had earlier lost to TiVo, that could have resulted in the satellite TV company disabling millions of digital video recorders. However, the US Court of Appeals review is a last straw effort as damages mounted. TiVo […]

Federal Trade Commision Chairman Jon Liebowitz told cable operators in Los Angeles for the NCTA show that the commission is not interested in regulating behavioural advertising so long as the industry is making “progress” toward self-regulation. “So long as self-regulation is making forward progress, the FTC is not interested in regulating in this area,” he […]

ITV1 is to remain bound by restrictions on how it can sell advertising airtime, the UK Competition Commission has ruled – but it added that the mechanism should be dropped at some point and that the entire UK TV ad sales market needs a review. The commission stood by its provisional decision in September to […]

Brian Roberts, chief executive of Comcast, said at NCTA he was not concerned about increased regulation from the Federal Communications Commission, which is seeking new authority to regulate cable and telecoms groups. The FCC is seeking to impose tougher regulations on high-speed Internet providers to guarantee that all content creators would be treated equally over […]

The FCC considers broadband service a sort of hybrid between an information service and a utility and that it has sufficient power to regulate Internet traffic under existing law, despite recent court cases that say it doesn't. Last month, a federal appeals court ruled that the FCC had exceeded its authority by telling Comcast the […]

Dutch ISP Ziggo, the country's largest, is facing court action for its refusal to block subscriber access to Swedish BitTorrent tracker site The Pirate Bay. It insists that it's simply a conduit to the Internet and shouldn't be forced to filter the results, especially considering there's no legal basis for such a request. “We are […]

BSkyB and Ofcom have reached an interim agreement on how to handle the period of Sky's appeal to the Competition Appeals Tribunal for Ofcom's wholesale price regulation order to be suspended. In essence, the terms of the WMO (Wholesale Must Offer) order are narrowed to specify, for now, the beneficiaries of lower prices as BT, […]

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has latched on to the disruptive technology formed when DLNA is combined with DTCP-IP and a form of high-bandwidth no-new-wire networking, and seems determined to use the opportunity to mandate the end of the pay-TV digital STB. The Commission wants to allow any CE manufacturer's devices to access pay-TV […]

The BBC is cracking down on re-streamers of its iPlayer services like TVCatchUp and Zattoo. "We took them [BBC channels] down and they will remain down and we will link to the iPlayer instead," CEO of Zattoo Beat Knecht told the Guardian. "This is to comply with a request of theirs; and it frees us […]