Comcast, the nation's largest cable TV operator with about 24 million subscribers, says it will have neither the power in the cable TV nor the programming businesses to raise rates, limit competition, or restrict access to entertainment and news.
Genachowski will not attend the hearing on the Northwestern University campus, and neither will three other FCC commissioners, including both Republicans, according to agency officials.
Commissioner Michael Copps, who has expressed reservations about the Comcast-NBCU merger, will lead the hearing, and other lower-ranking FCC officials will be there. The event will be streamed over the Internet at http://reboot.fcc.gov/live and begins at 1 p.m. (Chicago time). The testimony will become part of the public record.
Those scheduled to testify include officials with satellite-TV operator Dish Network Corp., cable overbuilder Wide Open West, the NBC independent affiliates group, the Tennis Channel, Nielsen Co., and the Technology Policy Institute.
Also testifying will be Josh Silver, the president and chief executive officer of Free Press, a nonprofit media-advocacy group that has tormented Comcast for several years and opposed media consolidation.
Free Press generated mass publicity over Comcast's interference of Internet traffic in 2007 that culminated in an enforcement action by the FCC.
Silver said Friday that the group had been sending out e-mails publicizing the Chicago hearing. The group published the "wanted" poster last week in the Reader, a Chicago weekly. It also is distributing fliers to supporters to post around Chicago, and it has a Facebook page for the event.
