With cable rate hike season festivities in full gear, the FCC issued their obligatory half-hearted complaint this week about skyrocketing cable rates. Usually such complaints are fielded, met with a few weeks worth of debate over whether cable TV channels should be sold “a la carte,” and then quickly ignored. But the message is a little more resilient this year given the struggling economy, or at least so sayeth FCC spokesperson Mary Diamond, who’s very concerned about you:

Of course FCC boss Kevin Martin spent much of the last few years working with phone company lobbyists to revamp the video franchise system, so AT&T and Verizon would have an easier time getting into the TV business. Unlike cable, the baby bells didn’t want towns and cities to have the power to forced them to deploy services into rural America, or deliver the occasional municipal demand — like free TV in the high school teacher’s lounge. But if you remember, the primary selling point for these franchise reform bills by both the FCC and telco lobbyists was that they would be the gateway to lower TV prices. So how’s that coming along, anyway?

Well, in the scattered few instances where States or the FCC were supposed to go back and investigate whether franchise reform actually did anything for consumers or their monthly bills, there’s an unsurprising lack of followup. In instances where someone actually bothered to track franchise reform’s impact on cable TV prices, data shows franchise reform simply resulted in higher rates, the death of public access TV (sorry Wayne, Garth), fewer community improvements, and spotty next-generation infrastructure upgrades

Despite the fact these bills have often resulted in phone companies raising rates too, phone company lobbying front groups like TV4US are still using higher-cable rates to push franchise reform laws in additional states. In reality, most of these bills are really aimed at stripping away State consumer protection laws, legalizing cherry picking and eroding eminent domain rights. They also provide the baby bells with one stop lobbying, by stripping authority from the nation’s towns and cities and transferring it to the State. But lower TV prices? Nowhere in sight.

Cable providers are raising TV rates anywhere from 3-11%. Verizon raised the price of FiOSTV 12% earlier this year and will implement new hikes in early 2009. Hikes are not only being seen on programming packages, but across DVR and assorted other hardware and service fees. So while the FCC is busy lamenting higher cable prices, they might want to remember one of their primary policy pushes of the last five years repeatedly promised the exact opposite.
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