Court cleans up FCC indecency policies

The courts are smacking the FCC upside the head left and right. First, the agency is told it went too far when it punished Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) for throttling broadband speeds, not it's told it shouldn't jump on every curse word or bit of flesh that shows up on broadcast TV.

Cable has always been pretty exempt from these rules. But the pay-for-play networks should be breathing about as big a sigh of relief as their over-the-air counterparts at Fox, CBS and ABC, because there was no telling how far the agency might go in its quests.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit took a look at the FCC's indecency policy at the bequest of the networks and concluded that it was "unconstitutionally vague, creating a chilling effect that goes far beyond the fleeting expletives at issue here."

Damn!

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