The 12 items on Thursday's FCC meeting agenda are the most in almost 10 years, bringing Chairman Ajit Pai's average to more than seven monthly agenda items, far outpacing recent predecessors. Pai is pursuing free-market, deregulatory policies aggressively, said most we queried, though some believe Pai is trying to overload critics. Pai pitched the commissioners' meeting as a "summer blockbuster" on high-band 5G spectrum, cable leased-access reversal, satellite broadband, intercarrier compensation, rural broadband, telecom legacy discontinuance streamlining aimed at spurring wireline broadband, and other items (see 1805160051).
Broadcasters need to move as quickly as possible to transition to ATSC 3.0 or they're in danger of losing their spectrum and market share to other industries, said FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly and Spectrum Consortium President John Hane in separate speeches Thursday to the ATSC Next Gen TV Conference. Through 3.0, broadcasters need to maximize the use of their existing spectrum, or it will be given to another industry, Hane said. Under the current technology, broadcasters provide a valuable service but take up too much spectrum to provide it, leading regulators to periodically pursue “progressive reclamation” of it as with the incentive auction, Hane said.
CHARLOTTE -- The FCC will vote in July on a proposal for using C-band spectrum, the 500 MHz of spectrum between 3.7 and 4.2 GHz, Chairman Ajit Pai told the Wireless Infrastructure Association Wednesday. Pai urged aggressive action to win the global 5G race but said he wants to find balance between industry and local government interests. Dish Network plans to spend at least $10 billion on 5G, technology that Chairman Charles Ergen predicted would add “a lot more” than $500 billion to the economy. Chasing a 5G network for IoT, “Dish is back to being a startup business,” Ergen said. The company is spending $500 million to $1 billion in the first phase of its plans, and tower executives voiced eagerness to assist.
The Department of Commerce is gathering data from U.S. companies on intellectual property transactions, in a mandatory survey. The “BE-120 Benchmark Survey of Transactions in Selected Services and Intellectual Property with Foreign Persons” survey requires all U.S. companies with combined inbound transactions of $1 million or outbound transactions of $2 million for FY 2017 to report type, amount and country involved in the IP transaction. Responses are due June 29-30, depending on format. The department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis is authorized to do the survey through the International Investment and Trade in Services Surveys Act. Companies failing to respond face fines up to $45,000, plus potential criminal penalties. Wiley Rein suggested the survey may “be used to support the goals of the Trump Administration’s ‘America First’ policies,” which emphasized IP protection.
FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said she was able to meet with Chairman Ajit Pai on only a few occasions since the first months of his chairmanship, a sharp departure from her experience with other chairmen. The past 15 months “have not been especially rewarding for me,” Clyburn said in a wide-ranging exit interview Monday. “I’ve seen this agency shift from a consumer-oriented, consumer-first point of view, to a singularly focused … deregulatory, laissez-faire, industry-first, infrastructure-oriented agency.” It's “painful and difficult to watch,” she told us.
Next-generation 5G service "is coming sooner than people thought" five years ago, when it was expected in 2021-2022, said John Godfrey, Samsung senior vice president on a panel at the FCBA retreat in Williamsburg, Va., Friday. Fixed 5G services are coming this year and mobile service in 2019-2020, he said. Verizon Vice President Melissa Tye said her company announced fixed service for Sacramento and plans to deploy in 4-5 more cities this year, with mobile service targeted to begin in 2019, though she said it's hard to say when will be ubiquitous. Godfrey and Wiley Rein attorney Anna Gomez said 5G promises higher speeds and capacity and lower latency. Asked about upcoming FCC 28 GHz and 24 GHz auctions, Godfrey said, "It's all about capacity," noting there's 800 MHz being made available in the 28 GHz band. The two bands "are going to be the workhorse of 5G for carrying heavy loads," he said. Tye said Verizon is currently focused on securing more spectrum in the 2.5-6 GHz mid-band, "the sweet spot" of good propagation and bandwidth. Gomez said densified small-cell networks needed local actions on zoning, permits and rights of way. Godfrey praised the FCC's streamlining of environmental and historical reviews for small-cell base stations, but added, "there's still a lot more to be done to speed up the approval process," and cities don't have to wait for the FCC to tell them what to do. Gomez said the FCC tried to have broad stakeholder representation on its Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee, but it's difficult because localities are feeling under attack. Audience member Best Best attorney Gerry Lederer asked when the FCBA will invite local governments to participate in the conversation, saying he was disappointed in the organization. Moderator Megan Stull, a Google counsel, said FCBA was open to local government participation and wants to work with localities. Asked about IoT, Godfrey said it will be the internet's connection to the physical world, which started on mainframes and then moved to personal computers and mobile devices: "It will be available everywhere on everything." The IoT needs ubiquitous, highly dense networks to connect things, which 5G will help provide, he said, calling it a "rocket fuel" for all sorts of services and applications that "you can't imagine." Panelists agreed privacy and cybersecurity will be major challenges in a 5G, IoT world.
A big Communications Act overhaul doesn't seem in the cards anytime soon, given the partisan divide in Congress, so smaller bills with bipartisan support like the Repack Airwaves Yielding Better Access for Users of Modern Services (Ray Baum's) Act (HR-4986) are probably the future norm, said former FCC Chairman Dick Wiley Tuesday at a Hudson Institute talk. The Wiley Rein co-founder said big, comprehensive communications legislation also isn't likely to be taken up at least until Congress settles the net neutrality issue. Wiley said the Sunshine Act, while well intentioned, has led to commissioners' meetings being scripted affairs and hurt the ability of commissioners to narrow differences and have working relationships. He said the law needs amending -- perhaps by allowing non-decisional meetings -- but the likelihood of that happening is slim "because it sounds like you're against transparency." Commissioner appointments coming from the Hill instead of the president has resulted in people who are highly qualified but often coming in with ties to the Hill and strong political viewpoints, Wiley said. He said FCC and other regulatory agencies have become politicized "little Congresses." He said the drawback of the old appointment process, where the president appointed commissioners from both parties, was too much homogeneity. Building camaraderie among commissioners would be tougher since the partisan divide is stronger, Wiley said. With a couple of exceptions -- like Ronald Reagan pushing the agency on keeping the rule governing TV program financing and syndication and Barack Obama's push on Title II regulation of the internet -- concern about White House influence on the FCC is overstated, Wiley said. Even when the Nixon administration was supposedly pushing the agency to block Washington Post Co. purchase of radio stations, "I never got a call on anything," he said. From a lobbying standpoint, that commissioners feel inclined to put out statements on every item adopted is helpful for knowing the thinking of that member, he said.
After confirmation Thursday of five FTC commissioners, several issues are worth watching early in their tenures concerning privacy, competition and personnel (see 1804260041), stakeholders said the next day. Topping issues, according to industry attorneys and former officials: a determination of potential 2011 consent decree violations by Facebook (see 1804050058), handling continued antitrust complaints against Google, and retention of acting Competition Bureau Director Bruce Hoffman and acting General Counsel Alden Abbott. “It’s an important and interesting time for the FTC because they’ve been shorthanded so long, so it’s really good to see a full complement of commissioners,” said Bloom Strategic Counsel founder Seth Bloom. “These next few months are going to be important to see what they’re up to and what they take up as their priorities.”
The FCC Incentive Auction Task Force released an additional $742 million in repacking reimbursement funds Monday, for its second allocation to broadcasters undergoing repacking, said a public notice Monday. The allocation was -- as expected (see 1803080049) -- adjusted upward to reflect the additional reimbursement funds recently provided by lawmakers. With this allocation full-power broadcasters have access to $1.74 billion -- nearly the whole of the original $1.75 billion repacking reimbursement fund. The PN includes a revised cost estimate of $1.88 billion for the repacking based on the funding requests submitted by broadcasters as of April 9. That’s down from the $1.95 billion estimate released by the agency in March, though the PN also says the repacking costs are expected to rise going forward. Broadcasters and broadcast attorneys have said the industry widely estimates the final cost of repacking full-power TV stations will be $2.5 billion. “Only a small fraction” of repacked entities are currently approaching the limit of their initial allocation funding, the PN said, but allocating the additional funds will allow those entities to “execute their post-auction construction.” With the original repacking reimbursement funds largely spoken for, the agency is expected to begin drawing on the additional funds provided by Congress, attorneys said. Though broadcasters welcome the additional allocated funds, the PN isn’t likely to trigger a wave of repacking spending, said Wiley Rein broadcast attorney Ari Meltzer. Broadcasters have been expecting a large second allocation since Congress added the additional repacking funding, he said. NAB praised the release of the funds, in a statement. "This additional repacking funding is critical to the 149 public television stations that are being repacked," said America's Public Television Stations CEO Patrick Butler in a statement. The money will allow noncommercial stations to pursue their goals without "fear of going off the air for lack of sufficient funds to complete the post-auction transition."
The FCC is expected soon to seek comment or otherwise address industry concerns about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and particularly the definition of automatic telephone dialing system (ATDS), after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned key parts of a 2015 order and declaratory ruling (see 1803160053). Then-Commissioner Ajit Pai dissented and his Republican colleague Mike O’Rielly partially dissented. Both warned that it would lead to more class-action lawsuits against companies trying to communicate with their customers through robocalls to customers.