The FCC commissioners were booed and hissed by prisoner advocates at the agency’s open meeting Tuesday as they voted 2-1 to approve an order that will increase rates for incarcerated people’s communications services (IPCS) on an interim basis.
NPR and CPB are battling in court over the disbursement of interconnection funds, according to documents filed Friday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. NPR wants a federal judge to force CPB to distribute public radio interconnection funds to NPR stations, it said in motions for a preliminary injunction and summary judgment. CPB filed its own motion for summary judgment the same day, arguing that NPR’s lawsuit would prevent CPB from “serving its Congressionally mandated role to serve as the steward of public dollars for public media.”
Advocates for incarcerated people, corrections trade groups and prison-calling companies disagree about the FCC’s draft order on incarcerated people’s communications services (IPCS), according to filings last week in docket 23-62. Thirty-five House Democrats panned the item in a letter (see 2510220049) and advocacy group FWD.us said the proposed rule would increase rate caps by up to 83%, “is based on misleading information, and unfairly shifts facility costs onto the families of incarcerated people.” Securus, meanwhile, said the rule revisions in the draft “make considerable progress towards placing IPCS on a sustainable path, both economically and legally, a critical outcome to all stakeholders.”
The FCC is expected to hold its open meeting Tuesday as scheduled, despite the government shutdown, said Chairman Brendan Carr and other agency officials in interviews. “The plan is to move forward with an in-person October open meeting as scheduled,” an FCC spokesperson told us.
The increasing adoption of AI and U.S. leadership in the technology require massive investments in wireless infrastructure, a focus on making more spectrum available, and attention from Congress and regulators on making those things happen, said speakers at the Wireless Infrastructure Association's Building the AI Future event Wednesday in Washington, D.C. “The bricklaying for AI that telecom provides is really, really important,” said Deputy NTIA Administrator Adam Cassady, while Crown Castle COO Cathy Piche told the panel that “wireless infrastructure is really AI infrastructure.”
The FCC’s draft further NPRM on ATSC 3.0 is seen by broadcasters as an indication of Chairman Brendan Carr’s good intentions toward the industry, but 3.0 opponents said the item highlights concerns about encryption, privacy and spectrum use.
A draft further NPRM proposing the relaxation of some FCC requirements for broadband labels is expected to be approved at the agency’s Oct. 28 meeting, but it isn’t yet clear how Commissioner Anna Gomez will vote on it.
The ongoing federal shutdown is causing anxiety and a lack of clarity for both FCC staff and industry attorneys, they told us in interviews. The FCC’s expectations for required filings during the shutdown are unclear, agency staffers are uncertain about when or if they will be paid, and less than two weeks remain before the Oct. 28 open meeting, which has the longest agenda the FCC has seen in years. Industry officials told us the shutdown could lead to some items being taken off the October agenda, but all three commissioners told us they're still taking meetings and calls on the planned items.
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez signaled that she's open to relaxing some broadcast-ownership rules, called for a clearly defined public interest standard, and again condemned FCC “censorship and control” efforts in her latest “First Amendment Tour” speech Thursday evening. “While one set of outlets is defunded, stripped of licenses or publicly admonished, others are quietly promoted and cleared of regulatory obstacles,” Gomez told a modest crowd at the University of Mississippi. The Trump administration’s goal “is not to reduce bias or to ensure balance, but to engineer a media environment that echoes the government's worldview.”
Wednesday was the start of the first fiscal year in over 50 years without federal funding for public broadcasting stations, and public broadcasters are starting to cut programming and even making plans to eventually go dark in some parts of the country, said America’s Public Television Stations CEO Kate Riley in interviews. “It feels like every day an announcement comes from another station talking about the services that they're having to cut, the layoffs they're having to make,” Riley said. “Our sense is that this is really just the beginning, and that this is going to be a rolling wave of these types of station cuts and reductions in services over the coming months.”