The consortium selected to manage industry efforts to trace illegal robocalls to comply with the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence Act "should enable the participation of a diverse range of voice service providers in the tracebacks that it conducts and allow the participation of any and all providers that are identified in the call path of a traceback," USTelecom told the FCC. Comments were posted through Tuesday in docket 20-22. The agency opened a rulemaking this month (see 2002060038). NCTA wants the consortium to create an executive committee represented by different industry sectors "given an equal voice in the management." The cable group wants budget transparency if fees are collected. It asked whether a traceback group must be independent from a single association. Incompas wants the FCC to spell out how it will evaluate a registrant's claim of neutrality, and it wants to know what criteria the agency will use to select a single consortium for the private-led traceback efforts. Incompas suggested the North American Numbering Council advise the FCC here. The FCC also got comments this week on technical requirements for a reassigned numbers database (see 2002250062).

Trying to spur rural broadband by removing regulatory oversight of electric cooperatives could have consequences for electric rates, reliability and other consumer protections overseen by the commission, cautioned Maryland Public Service Commission Chairman Jason Stanek at a Senate Finance Committee hearing livestreamed Tuesday from Annapolis. Officially, the commission is neutral on SB-540. Commissioner Anthony O’Donnell urged lawmakers to “think very carefully” about ramifications of removing oversight. Maryland Deputy People’s Counsel William Fields fears deregulation could raise consumers' electric rates. Sen. Malcolm Augustine (D) agrees. The legislation is critical to cleaning up state barriers keeping co-ops from providing broadband service to the eastern shore, said sponsor Sen. Stephen Hershey (R). “If we don’t do this, we have no other options on the table." Rate hikes are less a danger with cooperatives that are regulated by members, he said. Verizon supports the proposal as good for consumers and competition, and Hershey is working on getting Comcast support, he said. The bill would immediately support Choptank Electric Cooperative’s broadband business model, said Hershey and co-op officials. Choptank would be able to start rolling out service in Q1 2021, and within 10 years cover Maryland’s entire eastern shore with gigabit fiber service, testified CEO Mike Malandro. Comcast supported SB-790 at the hearing. It would direct the Department of Information Technology to waive resource sharing agreement fees for last-mile broadband projects in unserved areas and exempt private entities from DoIT project reviews if they have a separate right to access to install communications lines and facilities in the right of way. DoIT last summer misinterpreted a 1996 law and started to charge resource-sharing fees to ISPs, said Comcast Vice President-State Government Sean Looney. That stopped work by Comcast, Verizon and others in the right of way for eight months, he said.

The National Emergency Number Association warned floor-level data could be hard to obtain, in response to a Further NPRM on advanced vertical location, mapping and 911 services. Comments were due last week and posted through Monday in docket 07-114. “Lack of accurate, reliable floor level records represents a fundamental challenge to vertical location in the public safety setting,” the group said: “NENA has spoken with numerous participants in the real estate and indoor location industry; all agree that tax assessment records -- the most common and widely used ‘first pass’ source of building floor levels -- are roughly only 50% reliable, and nearly always require validation via another surveying method. In many jurisdictions, tax assessment records require merely square footage numbers for taxation purposes, so floor level data fields are often either left blank or inaccurately populated.” Be “mindful of the unique challenges facing rural carriers in deploying these technologies,” the Competitive Carriers Association asked. Google said the FCC should change its rules to “promote rather than discourage delivery of floor data to public safety answering points, and also encourage the use of testing protocols that account for real-world operating conditions and concerns.” T-Mobile advised flexibility. “We should not repeat the mistakes of the past, as with the initial deployments of horizontal 911 location solutions that relied on technology developed and implemented specifically for 911,” the carrier said: “Those solutions became obsolete and resulted in public safety being left behind, even as location technologies developed for the commercial market continued to develop and improve.”

The Benton Foundation is now called the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society (see 2002180054).

The California Public Utilities Commission plans to vote April 16 on T-Mobile/Sprint, with a proposed decision coming by March 13, Administrative Law Judge Karl Bemesderfer ruled Monday in docket A.18-07-011. The carriers wanted the agency to decide at its March meeting and last week said they could close the deal as early as April 1 (see 2002200066).

Dissenting to a denial of a petition for writ of certiorari to the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Monday, a Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested an earlier Brand X ruling upholding an FCC decision to keep cable modem service unregulated may be unconstitutional. "Although I authored Brand X, it is never too late" to surrender former views to a better-considered position, Thomas said. He added Brand X appears to be inconsistent with the Constitution, the Administrative Procedure Act and traditional tools of statutory interpretation. The justice was writing about an unrelated case that's not about net neutrality. "I don't see this as changing the outlook for net neutrality in the Supreme Court one way or the other," emailed Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. "Thomas' position on this has been expressed in the past, so what he said here doesn't change that." The FCC didn't comment. NCTA declined comment.

The National Association of Consumer Advocates and the National Consumer Law Center moved to file an amicus brief with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Friday to support a petition for rehearing en banc requested by the plaintiff in Melanie Glasser v. Hilton Grand Vacations Co., case 18-14499-J, in Pacer. "This case deals with the question whether the words 'store or produce' in the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's definition of 'automatic telephone dialing system' ... includes systems that store telephone numbers to be called using a random or sequential number generator even if the system does not also produce such numbers using a random or sequential number generator." The movants said they want the court to recognize their unique prospective as consumer advocates with a history of commenting on robocall issues "that can help the court beyond the help that the lawyers for the parties are able to provide."

The FCC mostly got a win in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on a 2013 FCC decision to set a $1.56 billion nationwide aggregate reserve price in the 2014 auction of H-block spectrum. NTCH urged the court to vacate Auction 96. Instead, the court ordered the FCC to consider the carrier’s petition for review of the grant of waivers to Dish Network. Oral argument was Oct. 8 (see 1910080050). In December 2013, the FCC granted Dish the relief it sought to decide on the operations of its AWS-4 spectrum, but the waiver was conditioned on Dish’s bid of nearly $1.6 billion in the H-block auction the next month. Judges Merrick Garland, David Tatel and Thomas Griffith issued a joint opinion. “We deny NTCH’s petitions for review of both the initial order modifying Dish’s AWS-4 licenses and the order setting the Auction 96 procedures,” they said: “Because the Commission wrongly dismissed NTCH’s application for review of the Bureau’s grant of the waivers,” the court vacated the commission order, remanding the claims. The FCC was wrong to dismiss NTCH’s application for review because of a lack of standing, the court said: “Because the Commission never reached the merits of NTCH’s challenge to the waiver, neither shall we. Having concluded that the Commission erred in its threshold analysis, we ‘remand to the agency for additional investigation or explanation.’” NTCH is weighing its options, said its lawyer Donald Evans of Fletcher Heald. “While we are pleased about the reversal on the waiver part of the case, we were surprised and disappointed that the Court did not address the merits of the ‘cash for waivers’ deal that the FCC made with DISH,” Evans emailed. The court defended the FCC’s overall decisions, challenged by NTCH. The court has said in the past it will “accept the Commission’s ‘technical judgment[s]’ when supported ‘with even a modicum of reasoned analysis, absent highly persuasive evidence to the contrary,’” the judges said. “This deferential standard of review makes NTCH’s task a daunting one.” The FCC chose “to modify Dish’s licenses largely because of the ‘technical judgment’ … that same-band, separate-operator sharing of the spectrum would be impractical.” The court said it couldn’t find, as NTCH asked, that the FCC’s failure to consider stripping Dish of its satellite rights was unreasonable. “Boiled down, NTCH claims that the Commission should have expanded the rulemaking’s scope to consider NTCH’s preferred resolution of the problem,” the court said: “But the Commission need not ‘resolve massive problems in one fell regulatory swoop.’ … Here, the Commission reasonably limited the rulemaking proceeding to proposals to expand terrestrial uses of the AWS-4 Band.”

AT&T Southwest Mobility workers authorized a strike with 98 percent in support, Communications Workers of America said Thursday. CWA’s contract with AT&T covering about 8,000 workers in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas expires Friday. “We have made progress toward a fair contract over the last few days, but several critical issues remain unresolved,” said Jason Vellmer, leading CWA’s bargaining team. The union wants “a new contract that protects our healthcare, improves wages, and keeps family-supporting, union jobs in the region,” he said. AT&T is confident it can reach agreement, said a spokesperson. "A strike vote is a routine" step, he emailed. "We’re continuing to bargain with the union, and we’re committed to reaching a fair agreement that will allow us to continue to provide solid union-represented jobs with competitive wages and benefits."

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks updated his Puerto Rico field hearing release Thursday to announce the witnesses speaking at Friday's hearing (see 2002200021). Some stakeholders said the short time between the hearing and its announcement last week could keep some from attending (see 2002130056). According to the update, the hearing will include testimony from Communications Workers of America staff representative Luis Benitez-Burgos, Information Technology Disaster Resource Center Chief of Operations for Puerto Rico Darrick Kouns, Puerto Rico Hospital Association President Jaime Pla-Cortes, Puerto Rico Telecommunications Regulatory Board President Sandra Torres Lopez, WorldNet CEO David Bogaty, WKAQ-TV San Juan Station Manager Jose Cancela, Liberty Puerto Rico CEO Naji Khoury and Claro Puerto Rico General Counsel Francisco Silva.