STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER JESSICA ROSENWORCEL
Re: Expanding Consumers’ Video Navigation Choices, MB Docket No. 16-42; Commercial 
Availability of Navigation Devices, CS Docket No. 97-80.
Here’s an experiment.  You can do it at home.  Just sit in your favorite comfortable chair—you 
know, the one in front of the television.  In one hand hold the remote control for your set top box.  In the 
other hand hold your mobile phone.  Now ask yourself which of these two devices has changed 
substantially over the past two decades?  Which has seen extraordinary innovation?  Which has benefited 
from competition?
The answers are obvious.  The bulky, graceless mobile phones from two decades ago have been 
replaced by sleek new models.  But it’s more than just aesthetics, because what we can do with these 
devices is incredible.  Smartphones have changed our lives—and are changing our world.  But the clunky 
set top box and many-buttoned remote have not evolved at the same pace—nor have they faced the same 
level of competition.  
The numbers make this very clear.  Ninety-nine percent of consumers still rent their set top boxes 
from their pay television provider.  The typical household spends more than $231 a year on set top box 
rental fees.  Costs are high, innovation is slow, and competition is limited.  
Congress did not want it to be this way.  Two decades ago, in the Telecommunications Act of 
1996, this agency was charged with ensuring the commercial availability of navigation devices—creating 
a competitive market for set top boxes.  There are times when legislative directives are not clear; this is 
not one of them.  
I think we can do better.  So I support today’s rulemaking.  
But I also think we have a lot of work to do.  Important questions have been raised about 
copyright, privacy, diversity—and a whole host of other issues in a marketplace that has been tough for 
competitive providers to crack.  We will need to explore them in the record that develops.  Let me raise 
one other:  This rulemaking is complicated.  It describes three information streams for navigation 
services, work that needs to be done by standards bodies, a medley of security systems, and a trio of 
parity requirements.  The most successful regulatory efforts are simple ones.  More work needs to be done 
to streamline this proposal, because in the end for consumers to enjoy the bounty of what we have 
proposed—execution is all.  
So what we have here may not be the precise way forward.  But something has got to give.  I 
support Chairman Wheeler’s effort to get this proceeding started.  Because it is time—past time—to live 
up to our statutory obligations and foster the competition consumers deserve.