There was more resistance to an FCC reassigned-number database proposal to help combat unwanted robocalls, in replies filed this week in docket 17-59. Initial comments provided greater support for a Further NPRM (see 1806080047 and 1803220028). AT&T endorsed CTIA views backing market solutions to prevent robocalls to reassigned numbers, "rather than creating a new database." If the FCC pursues a database, business caller beneficiaries should shoulder the costs, replied the telco, which urged simple industry reporting duties. Adopting a safe harbor from Telephone Consumer Protection Act liability for callers using a "qualified commercial data aggregator" could "spur competition for number verification services," leading to "solutions that are more cost effective and at least as accurate as any government-run database," said the American Cable Association. It said small voice providers should be exempt from reporting duties. CenturyLink backed resolving TCPA interpretation issues first, suggested a "wireless-only database" test before wider implementation, given frequent reassignment of cellular numbers, and said provider reporting costs must be reimbursed. Neustar said business caller support for a database is "predicated on the naive view" that its use "should involve only a 'nominal' fee or should even be 'free,' even while they advocate for robust features and functions." ITTA cited the "potentially substantial costs" and "uncertain" benefits. The "most practical way to eliminate multiple undesired calls to a reassigned number is for the individual who is receiving the call to communicate that the number being called is incorrect," because "no legitimate business" wants to repeatedly call unintended recipients, said the Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations, which suggested a study of complaints. The Alarm Industry Communications Committee, TracFone and "15 SMS Industry Participants" voiced database concerns. But Comcast said "a large and diverse ... cross-section of business commenters, consumer groups, and governmental bodies agree on the basic policy justifications" for the database and safe harbor proposals, with "substantial common ground" on many implementation details. Opponents "generally overstate the costs" and underestimate benefits of a database, which would be "a significant improvement over existing commercial tools," Comcast said. Also supportive were the Retail Industry Leaders Association and Student Loan Servicing Alliance.

The FCC went on a full-court press on social media Wednesday defending a formal complaint rules proposed order on Thursday's commissioners' meeting agenda. "Fake news travels fast!," tweeted Chief of Staff Matthew Berry about a report painting the rule change as harming consumers. "Nothing is changing" with regard to how informal complaints are handled, he said. He called other coverage "fake news" and tweeted kudos to The Washington Post for a fact-check. The FCC's official Twitter account also lauded the Post story. The order has come under fire from some House Democrats (see 1807100069). Insinuations that filing any complaint will require a $225 filing look "false ... but I'm going to report on it and characterize it as probably true because I dislike" Chairman Ajit Pai, Nebraska College of Law assistant professor Gus Hurwitz tweeted, characterizing some coverage. R Street Institute technology policy fellow Joe Kane tweeted similarly about media coverage. An FCC spokesman emailed that the House Democrats' letter "is completely inaccurate" and that the draft order "would simply align the text of a rule with longstanding FCC practices [regarding formal complaints] that have been in place for years." He said the $225 fee for handling formal complaints "has been the norm" and there's no fee-less venue for formal complaints. Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood had criticisms of the proposed rule change's revised language on setting a carrier response deadline and elimination of text indicating no obligation to respond to a complainant when both sides are satisfied (see here and here). He tweeted (see here and here) that the FCC claim the proposed order contains no substantive changes is "the Chairman's office spin machine is in full gear" since it removes the agency's ability to decide on informal complaints.

The FCC is “planning to rebuild and re-engineer” its electronic commenting filing system and has asked the House and Senate Appropriations committees for “the funds necessary,” Chairman Ajit Pai wrote Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. “We hope they will enable us to make important improvements by approving it soon.” The revamp would come more than a year after the ECFS application programming interface experienced problems during an FCC proceeding on rescinding its 2015 net neutrality rules. The FCC faced pushback over its claim the glitch stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service attack (see 1710130052 and 1806050046). “In addition to being technologically behind the times, the system that this Commission inherited from the prior Administration was designed to make it as easy as possible to file comments,” Pai told Merkley and Toomey. “While facilitating widespread public participation in the rulemaking process is a worthy and important goal, we believe that we can accomplish that goal while at the same time updating our system to minimize the potential for abusive behavior.” Pai said he will make several proposals that reflect the lawmakers' suggestions, including pitching CAPTCHA authentication or similar verification. “We will seek to redesign ECFS to institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct,” Pai said. The senators' offices didn't comment Wednesday. The FCC doesn't “have any information regarding whether any 'fake' comments were submitted by foreign governments, nor can we verify the total number of comments that may have originated from bots,” Pai told the senators: More than 7.5 million comments that favored 2015 rules had the same exact sentence and were “associated with only 50,508 unique names and street addresses.” More than 447,000 comments favoring 2015 rules claimed to come from people residing at the same address in Chelyabinsk, Russia, Pai said. Docket 17-108 had 2 million comments that used stolen identities, half a million from Russian email addresses and almost 8 million nearly identical comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com (see 1805090076).

The full FCC voted to adjust application fees to reflect a 3.7 percent increase in the consumer price index, said an order in Tuesday’s Daily Digest. The FCC "expects that this Order will become effective before October 1," the order said.

The U.S. policy path to spurring the growth of artificial intelligence comes in freeing up spectrum for flexible use, cutting red tape and "regulatory humility" of avoiding imposing rules in the absence of market failure or consumer harm, Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the ITU Global Symposium for Regulators in Geneva, per prepared remarks. He said that through ITU is opportunity to work on international spectrum allocation and harmonization that can help along AI and other emerging technologies. He said guaranteeing universal access is a key part of the U.S. approach to emerging technologies, and ITU's priority should be widespread broadband connectivity to help drive the potential of AI, blockchain and other technologies. Pai has mulled organizing an FCC forum on AI and machine learning to help the agency get up to speed on such emerging tech (see 1806140049).

FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly sought to clarify Guam’s diverting of state 911 fee revenue for unrelated purposes, in a Friday letter to Mikel Schwab, DOJ civil chief for Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. O’Rielly asked Guam twice for information after the territory didn’t respond to FCC staff for the agency’s latest report on 911 fee diversion (see 1806200052), then last month faced a flurry of conflicting takes from Guam representatives about scope, legality and impact of fee shifts there. Gov. Eddie Calvo (R) wrote June 21 to O’Rielly, saying that a September bill authorized such tactics, though a previous law set up a 911 fund from which money couldn’t be transferred. The actions complied with federal and local laws and didn’t disrupt emergency response, Calvo said. Guam’s acting fire chief confirmed the territory diverted $448,799 in 2016, failing to tell the FCC due to “internal personnel assignments.” Also June 22, Guam Legislature Speaker Benjamin Cruz (D) wrote O’Rielly to clarify “false” statements by Calvo that the territory’s diversion was legal. The legislator said the law authorizing diversion allowed it only from FY 2018, not retroactively, so it wouldn’t cover the 2016 shifting. Later that day, in another letter to O’Rielly, Calvo called Cruz’s letter a “political ploy” and restated that Guam is complying with federal E-911 policy. O’Rielly attached the letters to his asking Schwab to clarify if Guam appropriately allocated the 911 funds. “Regardless of whether Guam can divert 9-1-1 funds, there is no question as to whether it should divert such funds,” O’Rielly wrote. “I am not interested in engaging in local politics in Guam or anywhere else. What I am interested in is ending the disgraceful practice of 9-1-1 fee diversion throughout the country.”

AT&T's Randall Stephenson, Comcast's Brian Roberts and Disney's Bob Iger could potentially be the media company CEO who leads the industry through coming turbulent changes, S&P Global reported Monday to investors. It said the chief previously most likely to fill that role was Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes, but AT&T's buy of TW ended that. S&P said while all three are from "old school" companies, new media company executives seem more interested "in disrupting the established order than leading it." It said AT&T, Comcast and Disney are pursuing acquisition strategies to significantly expand their brands, geographic reach and content. The ratings firm said Comcast has yet to fully spell out its proposed future as a media giant. It said Disney could be most disruptive depending on how fast it delinks ESPN from the traditional pay-TV ecosystem, while despite little experience with content, AT&T has an "ambitious global media agenda." The firm said scale is key to media survival, and with those companies having made sizable moves, the rest of the industry should follow.

The FCC directed the North American Numbering Council "to advise the Commission on consolidating the contracts of two numbering administrators -- the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (NANPA) and the Pooling Administrator (PA) -- to bring about more cost-efficient and effective operations by a combined entity (NANPA/PA)," said a unanimous order Monday in docket 99-200.

The FCC Friday released performance measurement rules for the Connect America Fund. They cover high-cost universal service support recipients, including price cap and rate-of-return carriers, rural broadband experiment support recipients, Alaska Plan carriers and CAF Phase II auction winners. The order offers “high-cost support recipients that serve fixed locations three options to afford flexibility in choosing solutions to conduct required performance testing,” the FCC said in docket 10-90. Those options are using: Measuring Broadband America program infrastructure; existing network management systems and tools, or off-the-shelf testing; or provider-developed self-testing configurations. Last year, the FCC sought comment on performance measures (see 1711060055). “By providing these three options, we ensure that there is a cost-effective method for conducting testing for providers of different sizes and technological sophistication,” the FCC said. “We do not require that providers invest in and implement new internal systems; instead, providers may perform speed and latency tests with readily-available, off-the-shelf solutions or existing MBA infrastructure.” The order was released by the Wireline and Wireless bureaus and the Office of Engineering and Technology. The FCC also said Friday it will conduct a single CAF II mock auction, for all applicants listed as qualified to bid in the qualified bidders public notice, on July 18-19. “Participants will be able to use and become familiar with all features of the CAF II Bidding System that they will use during the actual bidding,” the FCC said. “The mock auction is designed so that, within several rounds of bidding, bidders will experience key auction events.”

The FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee is scheduled to meet at the FCC July 26 and 27 in what's expected to be a key meeting as the group nears the end of the first stage of its work. The FCC announced the dates of the meeting Friday. Topic one will be recommendations from the Harmonization Working Group, which is working to harmonize the Model Code for Municipalities and Model Code for States approved by BDAC in April. The BDAC is also to hear a report from its Ad Hoc Committee for Rates and Fees and discuss what happens next and what role the BDAC will play now that the first stage of its work is mostly complete. Commissioner Brendan Carr has said he's preparing an item for commissioner consideration that will address how to speed local and state decisions on wireless siting as industry moves forward on 5G.