FCC Nominee Up for Crucial Senate Vote

President Biden's nominee for the FCC Gigi Sohn, a vocal, progressive telecom lawyer and activist who co-founded an advocacy group funded by billionaire ­George ­Soros, is being vehemently opposed by Senate Republicans. She has received at best lukewarm support from moderate Dems in the Senate, making her nomination a tough lift for the Biden administration.

Gigi Sohn

According to Charles Gasparino at the NY Post, Sohn’s latest confirmation hurdle: Her name appearing on a settlement agreement between a little-known outfit named Locast and some of the nation’s biggest broadcasters. 

Sohn’s role in the deal and the conflicts it may pose, varies depending on whom you speak to. Locast was created in 2018 by a progressive telecom exec named David Goodfriend to do something pretty innovative: Giving people who can’t afford cable access high-quality local programming by siphoning and streaming broadcast signals of the big media companies. The service was billed as a freebie, but Locast welcomed $5 monthly donations.

The whole operation was legal, ­Locast contended, because it was a nonprofit, which could under law take those signals and distribute them to customers as long as the entity doesn’t make any money.

What Locast was doing understandably irked the big networks, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox. They sued, stating that Locast violated copyright laws, essentially stealing their content. Moreover, Locast’s ask of that $5 donation meant it was looking to make money.

Locast was run by a nonprofit named Sports Fans Coalition of New York. The outfit had some smart legal minds advising it, including Sohn, a Georgetown law professor with a deep résumé in telecom law. 

Both sides went to court confident of the path to victory, but in September of last year, Southern District Judge Louis Stanton sided with the big broadcasters. Locast was forced to shut down; the judge said the company wasn’t a nonprofit — those donations in his view went beyond what is “necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating.”

The terms seemed steep: Locast appeared to owe $32 million in damages. Goodfriend and Sohn both signed the settlement and that was supposed to be the end of the story.

The backstory on all of this could derail Sohn’s nomination as it makes it way to a vote in the Commerce Committee this Wednesday. Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the committee, questioned Sohn during her Dec. 1 hearing. He then asked her in writing how ­Locast came up with the full $32 million payment to the broadcasters — a seemingly big chunk of change for an outfit billed as a not-for-profit.

A senior GOP committee aide told the Post “discrepancies between [Sohn’s] testimony at the hearing and the details of the settlement … are driving Wicker to call for a new hearing.”

Sohn and Goodfriend, for their parts, declined to comment. A person close to both with knowledge of the settlement says, however, that Wicker is grasping for conflicts that don’t exist and certainly shouldn’t disqualify Sohn from the FCC.