The Federal Communications Commission will likely postpone all important business, including its proposal to reform cable set-top boxes, until President-elect Donald Trump takes office next year.
The FCC deleted all of the big-ticket items from its monthly meeting on Thursday at the request of Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who sent a letter earlier this week requesting that the agency not take up any "complex, partisan, or otherwise controversial items" until next year.
"In light of the congressional letters we received, we have revised the meeting agenda," the FCC told Motherboard in a statement. The tabled agenda items include the next phase of the agency's effort to improve mobile broadband access, as well as proposals to implement a unified roaming standard and regulate Voice over LTE (VoLTE).
As Sen. Thune notes, Democrats sent a similar letter in 2008, asking the FCC to hold off on work regarding the transition to digital television until President Obama took office; the agency complied.
Although the FCC did not specifically mention the set-top box overhaul, it is likely that it too is dead. The proposed rules would let pay-TV customers ditch the set-top box for apps that work with services like Roku and Apple TV. According to the FCC, 99 percent of US consumers lease a set-top box from their pay TV provider, in large part because of outdated government regulations.
But the cable industry has sharply criticized the plan, instead offering their own version of apps, like Comcast's Xfinity TV Partner, which allow subscribers to watch live broadcasts on any device the way they stream Netflix or other Internet video services.
Trump has not weighed in on the plan, but Motherboard notes that Republican FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is reportedly on Trump's list of potential candidates to lead the FCC. Pai has been an outspoken critic of the set-top box reform.
Trump's stance on net neutrality, encryption, and other tech policy issues, meanwhile, is clearer. He is mostly against net neutrality, and criticized Apple earlier this year for refusing to help the FBI access an encrypted iPhone as part of a criminal investigation. The Internet Association, a lobbying group made up of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants, sent a letter to Trump this week urging him to take a more pro-encryption stance.