FCC review of the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile deal (CD Bulletin March 21) could take at least a year because the commission will review not only the deal’s impact on the national market but will go through individual markets around the country to assess the costs and benefits of the merger, an agency official said Monday. The commission is already trying to build up staff in the Wireless Bureau for the review, the official said. One name that has already surfaced is FCC economist Susan Singer, who had been detailed to the Office of Strategic Planning and may well be recalled to the Wireless Bureau to lead its review, the official said.
The FCC Thursday unanimously approved three items aimed at improving communications and radio service on tribal lands. Commissioners also heard testimony from tribal leaders about the state of communications in Indian country. The meeting came as the White House held a follow up meeting on last year’s Tribal Nations Summit.
President Barack Obama’s broadband stimulus program was “vindicated” by new NTIA findings that up to two-thirds of America’s schools can’t get broadband at speeds they need, NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling. Thursday, the agency unveiled its new broadband map. The map indicated that up to 10 percent of Americans can’t get broadband. The map is based on more than 125 million searchable records in the new mapping database, with information from some 1,600 broadband companies. “All of these records can be analyzed in countless ways,” Strickling said. “But the data continues to show that a digital divide continues to exist."
The time may finally be right for an overhaul of the Universal Service Fund and of intercarrier compensation, said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps. He’s hopeful a “method” will be found to turn things like the rulemaking notice, approved by commissioners at last week’s monthly meeting, into “momentum” for making fixes to update the rules for the broadband age, he told us in a Q-and-A after his FCBA luncheon speech. “I think we've teed up an item that really raises all the issues,” he said, saying the regulator should hold stakeholder hearings on the issue. Copps used the speech to defend public broadcasting against Republican legislators’ efforts to cut funding and to urge the FCC and Chairman Julius Genachowski to do more to promote media diversity.
The Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance is turning to Genevieve Morelli as president to help beef up its membership and lead the association through the Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation overhauls, the group said Monday. Corporate acquisitions including Windstream-Iowa Telecom, CenturyLink-Embarq and the pending CenturyLink-Qwest deal are cutting into the association’s membership, said board Chairman Matthew Dosch.
Sustaining community media and its adoption of multiple communications platforms must be achieved through better infrastructure, cable franchising and other policy priorities, community media leaders said at an event late Wednesday discussing a new report at the New America Foundation. A major threat is the public’s access to distribution infrastructure, said Joshua Breitbart, an analyst for the foundation’s Open Technology Initiative: “That threat necessitates a multi-platform approach to community media.” Public, educational and governmental (PEG) channels are increasingly taking advantage of new technologies and working across other forms of media, including mobile, wireless and cable, he said. “If there are challenges or losses in one platform, there are other opportunities for distribution."
Critics of Internet regulation called the FTC’s hiring of Tim Wu (CD Feb 9 p12), credited with coining the expression “net neutrality,” an especially untimely signal that the commission will deepen its intervention in online matters. The FTC’s ability to attract prominent academics such as Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York, and Chief Technology Officer Edward Felten, a Princeton University professor of computer science and public affairs, reflects that the commission “is able to take more political risks than the FCC is at this point,” said Prof. Susan Crawford of Cardozo Law School in New York, who led the transition review of the FCC in 2008 and was a White House technology adviser the next year.
Critics of Internet regulation called the FTC’s hiring of Tim Wu (WID Feb 9 p7), credited with coining the expression “net neutrality,” an especially untimely signal that the commission will deepen its intervention in online matters. The FTC’s ability to attract prominent academics such as Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School in New York, and Chief Technology Officer Edward Felten, a Princeton University professor of computer science and public affairs, reflects that the commission “is able to take more political risks than the FCC is at this point,” said Prof. Susan Crawford of Cardozo Law School in New York, who led the transition review of the FCC in 2008 and was a White House technology adviser the next year.
The FCC took its first steps toward remaking the Universal Service Fund and the intercarrier compensation system Tuesday with a 5-0 vote in favor of a broadly worded rulemaking notice. The commission also voted to adopt a notice for a separate rulemaking that commission officials said will “streamline its data collection program” and eliminate “unneeded data collections that impose unnecessary burdens on filers.”
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is taking an aerial view of revamping universal service and intercarrier compensation in a new rulemaking notice. It takes up in general the necessity of subsidizing and deploying high-speed broadband but leaves contentious questions like the contribution factor for another day, commission and industry officials said. As expected, the FCC circulated a rulemaking notice late Tuesday for the commission meeting Feb. 8. The commission wants to use “market-driven, incentive based policies and increased accountability” to shift universal service money to “near term support for broadband deployment in unserved areas,” the agency said in a news release. It seeks to adopt measures to address intercarrier compensation (ICC) “arbitrage, as well as a long-term transition from current high-cost support and ICC mechanism to a single, fiscally responsible Connect America Fund,” the FCC said.