For Tuesday’s FCC meeting, the Commission had an agenda crowded with items dealing with the cable television industry.  The issues that were to be discussed may well have provided the controversy that caused the Commission to start its meeting 12 hours after its scheduled beginning.  At the end of the day, two controversial issues were discussed, prompting strong rhetoric from the Commissioners.  Two specific items were adopted over dissent from some of the Commissioners.  In the first, the Commission agreed to collect more information from cable systems about their subscriber numbers to determine if the cable industry has surpassed the 70/70 threshold, (passing 70 percent of all U.S. television households with 70 percent of those households subscribing to cable) which would open a statutory door for the Commission to adopt more intrusive cable regulations.  Second, the FCC slashed the costs of leased access to cable channels, cutting the costs for non-affiliated programming companies that want to lease channel capacity on cable systems to provide their programs.  Details about both of these actions, and some of the discussions about these items, can be found in a Bulletin published by our firm, available here.