Changes Expected on ICS Item Amid Some FCC Discussions
The FCC is expected to make some changes on inmate calling services when members vote Thursday (see 2007160072), including adding questions to an NPRM. Staff for commissioners has been discussing tweaks, and talks have been mostly amiable, agency and industry officials said in interviews this week. Providers and proponents of lower calling rates for inmates want changes to the draft, including over how calls are classified. Eighty percent of traffic is classified as intrastate, the rest interstate, and ICS providers warn that could flip based on the order.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
The FCC has oversight over interstate ICS, saying states govern intrastate calls. A Further NPRM proposes to lower interstate caps from 21 cents per minute for debit and prepaid calls and 25 cents for collect calls to 14 cents from prisons, 16 cents from jails. The FCC proposes a different mechanism for assessing caps. An accompanying order says “ancillary service charges generally cannot be practically segregated between the interstate and intrastate jurisdictions, except in a limited number of cases.”
The rulemaking responds to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which twice remanded revamp efforts. The court asked the FCC to consider "whether ancillary service charges -- separate fees that are not included in the per-minute rates that inmate calling services providers charge for individual calls -- can be segregated into interstate and intrastate."
Action so close to an election surprised Paul Wright, Human Rights Defense Center director. After three and a half years of inactivity, “now, 100 days before the election, there is a likelihood that anything the commission does will get tossed under a new administration, just as they unceremoniously tossed their predecessors' years of hard work into the proverbial wastebasket of regulatory disdain for the poor,” he said. “After almost 20 years on the FCC docket and the FCC thinks that consumers paying 14 cents a minute for a phone call is a good reform.” Wright said no one anywhere else pays 14 cents a minute for basic phone service. “This perpetuates the hedge fund-owned duopoly of Securus and GTL that see exploiting prisoners and their families as their path to riches on the backs of the poorest people in America,” he said.
“We're pleased that the FCC is asserting its authority over ancillary fees and that the new analysis in the remand record now successfully demonstrated to the FCC that it does have authority over intrastate fees,” said lawyer/adviser Cheryl Leanza of the United Church of Christ: “I’m very pleased to see a strong FNPRM. We were gratified to have productive conversations with the chairman’s office and the eighth floor about making that notice stronger. I only wish that we had seen this notice a lot sooner.”
Network Communications International President Bill Pope expects changes. “The FCC kind of opened up a can of worms by stating that inmate phone providers can charge a transaction fee on single-payment calls,” said the executive of the No. 4 U.S. ICS: The 2016 order “said no per-call surcharges, which intended not to add transaction fees onto a single call.” One minute can cost 16 cents, plus $3, he said. The FCC “made a gross error,” he said. The agency erred in capping cost recovery for corrections officials at 2 cents per minute, he said: “Why did they do that?” Other ICS providers didn’t comment.
“The jurisdictional nature of a call depends on the physical location of the endpoints of the call and not on whether the area code or NXX prefix of the telephone number are associated with a particular state,” the draft says: “To the extent an inmate calling services provider cannot definitively establish the jurisdiction of a call, it may and should treat the call as jurisdictionally mixed and thus subject to our ancillary service charge rules.”
Global Tel*Link questioned how the rules would potentially expand oversight. “The new requirement to ‘definitively establish’ jurisdiction on an end-to-end basis appears to be eliminating a long accepted practice by the FCC that is relied upon today by many in the industry, as well as indirectly broadening the FCC’s jurisdiction -- potentially to cover intrastate calls that cannot be definitively established as such,” GTL said in docket 12-375.
“If the Commission now adopts a new standard that effectively requires all calls terminating to mobile telephones to be rated as interstate … it will have dramatic impacts on all carriers that have heretofore used reasonable proxies to determine jurisdiction,” Securus said: “Many calls that have previously been rated as intrastate will have to be treated as interstate because the point of termination cannot be determined.” The jurisdictional approach proposed is “inconsistent with decades of Commission and telecommunications carrier practice and would have ramifications far beyond ICS,” Securus said: It’s "effectively the promulgation of a new rule, without notice or opportunity for comment.”