State AGs Clash With Industry on Speed for Implementing Alerting Changes
CTA and other industry groups urged that the FCC look closely at concerns raised in initial comments about rules for implementing multilingual wireless emergency alerts (see 2406140051). Meanwhile, some state attorneys general oppose industry efforts at slowing the move to require multilingual alerts. Replies were posted through Monday in dockets 15-91 and 15-94 in response to a notice from the FCC Public Safety Bureau (see 2405130047). The notice proposed a 30-month deadline for implementing templates in English and 13 other languages, plus American Sign Language.
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 AGs, mostly from Democratic states, urged that the FCC move quickly on imposing rules. Nothing is in the record that would “justify the Commission’s abruptly reversing course and directing that the ongoing effort to develop appropriate templates for notifying the public of certain emergency situations be aborted” in favor of reliance on AI-powered machine translation, the AGs said.
AI-powered alerts “if not verified by native speakers of a language, present a serious risk of conveying inaccurate information to the public, potentially causing confusion, panic, and increased risks to public safety,” the AGs said. Signing the filing were AGs from Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York state and city, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
“While CTA recognizes the value of enhancing WEA accessibility by implementing multilingual emergency alerts, the Commission should consider potential technical hurdles,” the group said. CTA said it shares CTIA’s concerns about the feasibility of the development and implementation of fillable fields. This “would require significant additional standards development and end-to-end testing to ensure the resulting alerts do not confuse or endanger consumers.” CTA seconded concerns that fillable elements may not be “directly inserted into ASL templates like they can for text-based alerts.”
The record so far “reflects a lack of consensus regarding the utility, viability, and implementation of pre-installed templates to enhance multilingual alerting,” CTIA warned. Moreover, the record reflects concerns from alert originators, the wireless association said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency advised that the proposed templates would require “significant additional study and collaboration to resolve issues including message length and content, whether to accompany multilingual alerts with the English alert, the challenges with and management of form-fillable templates, the development of effective WEAs” for ASL “and the time required for implementation,” CTIA said.
T-Mobile said it agrees with comments that a 30-month implementation deadline lacks adequate time to implement the required templates. The carrier also asked the FCC to further explore the “potential of device-based machine language translation to convert WEA messages scripted in English into many different languages.” AI continues evolving and recent advances may improve machine-language translation, the carrier said. At minimum, the FCC should work with FEMA and the National Weather Service “on AI and machine translation research,” T-Mobile said.
The National Weather Service urged an “incremental approach” to implementing multilingual alerts and said it could help with AI and machine learning in providing translations. Colorado alerting authorities said multi-language templates should remain voluntary for alert originators. “The Universal template languages are not customizable and may conflict with local language, creating confusion that could result in inaccurate information and delays in response,” the Colorado authorities said.