The government's role as gatekeeper is no more pronounced than in its regulation of broadcast licenses, says a briefing paper from the House Energy & Commerce Committee, this one on video programming.

It is the latest in the Republican leadership of the committee's series of white papers (the sixth) on communications policy, meant to provoke stakeholder input and provide some guidance on how that leadership views various key communications issues in its run-up to a planned remake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act starting next year.

The paper says that back when the FCC was created in the early part of the last century (1934), "the thinking was that a broadcast license essentially grants the licensee an exclusive right to a public soapbox, while denying such rights to others."

Read more at B&Chere.