New FCC chairman gives monthly cable box fees a renewed lease on life

You might think it would be easy for political appointees to rally against something as unpopular as the monthly fees that cable and satellite TV services charge for their converter boxes -- particularly when federal law requires them to do something about it. Sadly, the opposite has been true for the Federal Communications Commission, which was instructed by Congress in 1996 to develop rules that would end the effective monopoly that pay-TV providers hold over set-top boxes. Years of work produced a klugey and poorly supported "CableCard" system to allow devices to perform the functions of a cable set-top, but it certainly hasn't produced the explosion of choices that lawmakers had hoped to create. Good luck finding a TV set with a CableCard slot. In the latest turn of the screw, new Chairman Ajit Pai put the commission's most recent (and highly controversial) set-top box proposal in limbo, which in this case appears to be a way station on the road to eternal damnation. That proposal would have required pay-TV providers to make their services available through a standardized app that could run on a variety of major consumer-electronics devices.