Council to Weigh Dispute Over Access to Internet Via Cable TV

The Los Angeles City Council is expected to weigh in today on one of the most controversial aspects of cable TV, and it isn’t even about television.

It is about the Internet, and who will control its delivery at high speeds to hundreds of thousands of households in Los Angeles over cable television lines.

Cable TV operators, who are pouring billions of dollars into upgrades to allow them to deliver the Internet up to 100 times faster than on ordinary telephone lines, say they have the sole right to sell the service to their customers through their lines. One local cable operator, Media One, has already begun offering Internet service to its customers, and a Time-Warner system in the east San Fernando Valley plans to make it available this summer.

But the current front-runner of Internet providers over telephone lines, America Online, and smaller services have banded together nationally to charge that the cable companies’ control over cable lines is unfair competition. They want the right to offer their own services via the same high-speed cable lines, at a fair cost to them.

The issue that comes before the council today specifically concerns a 94,000-subscriber system in the east San Fernando Valley owned by Tele-Communications Inc., but it will probably affect almost every cable system in Los Angeles.

Those effects will not be felt for some time. The council is to vote on a resolution, drafted over the last several weeks by the city Information Technology Agency, which calls for nondiscriminatory access to cable “for all providers of Internet and online services.”

What that wording means is open to so many different interpretations that the resolution calls for a 90-day study period to determine how it is to be implemented.

The cable operators say that there is already sufficient competition in the high-speed Internet field, and that their control of the cable lines does not constitute a monopoly. AOL and its allies say that if they are not given equal access to cable, customers will be left with only one choice--the one their cable operator decides to provide.

Overlaid on these arguments are myriad legal, technical and financial issues that are far from settled in the brave new world of cable Internet access. And there is a trump card--at some point the Federal Communications Commission might weigh in with a decision that would settle the matter, nationwide. Until, of course, it goes to court.

“It’s so complicated and moving so quickly,” said Alan Arkatov, president of the city cable agency, “that sometimes it makes your head spin like Linda Blair.”

The East Valley system has come before the council because it plans on going through a change in ownership, which requires council approval. The tentative new owner is AT & T, the original Ma Bell, which plans to acquire TCI in a deal worth more than $40 billion that will give it access to lines running to about one-third of the homes nationwide hooked up to cable TV.

The AT & T deal to absorb the cable giant is still awaiting approval from the FCC.

If the deal is ratified, AT & T executives said, they plan to offer subscribers TV, Internet and telephone service, all though cable lines.

The path Los Angeles takes through this morass will probably be closely watched, for several reasons.

“L.A. has the toughest consumer standards, bar none,” said Arkatov. Last year it fined Century Cable $12.3 million, the biggest penalty ever imposed on a cable operation, for what it charged were excessive rates.

And there is the city’s position in the media hierarchy.

“We are the second-largest city in the country and the entertainment capital of the world,” he said. “What happens here matters everywhere.”