NCTA wants the FCC to seek comment on future broadcaster requests for waiver of the top-four ownership prohibition with stand-alone, transaction-specific public notices, rather than burying the notice in lists of other proceedings, the MVPD group said in an ex parte letter posted in docket 18-349 Thursday. NCTA pointed to a Media Bureau order in June granting a request for such a waiver from Imagicomm Greenwood, which noted that the application was unopposed. “This is not surprising, given that the Commission did not expressly seek comment on the applicant’s request for waiver of the Top-4 Rule,” NCTA said. “Rather, the Commission included these applications on a 31-page Public Notice along with 154 other items even though Top-4 waiver applications are not run-of-the-mill requests routinely included in general public notices.” When it adopted the waiver process in 2017, the FCC said the case-by-case review would allow affected parties to “advance any relevant concerns,” NCTA said. A stand-alone, transaction-specific notice would better comport with the prior commission’s assurances, the group said.
As the FCC commissioners voted up a trio of regulatory items Thursday, Chairman Brendan Carr was predicting "a very, very busy" July and August, with a greater focus on accelerating infrastructure buildouts and freeing up spectrum. Approved at the agency's June meeting were orders streamlining cable TV rate regulation and axing the professional engineer certification requirement for the biannual broadband data collection filings, as well as an NPRM proposing to end the requirement that telecommunications relay services providers support the now-obsolete ASCII transmission format. Thursday's meeting was the first for Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty, who was sworn in Monday (see 2506230057). With Carr now having a two-person Republican majority, agency watchers anticipate that it will ramp up more substantive work aligned with his agenda (see 2506200052).
The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau has granted certification for several companies to provide video relay service (VRS) and IP captioned telephone service (IP CTS) supported by the Interstate Telecommunications Relay Service Fund, said three public notices Wednesday. Sorenson Communications, which is majority-owned by Ariel GP Holdco, was granted certification to provide VRS and is eligible for TRS compensation through June 24, 2030. CaptionCall, also owned by Ariel GP, was certified to provide IP CTS with TRS compensation for the same five-year period. NexTalk Software, owned by Solen Ventures, was granted a conditional certification to provide IP CTS. NexTalk will be eligible for TRS fund compensation when the FCC takes action on its application for full certification, the notice said. “We find it to be in the public interest to grant such conditional certification pending a full determination of NexTalk Software’s qualifications.”
The FCC Wireline Bureau could use $129 million in leftover funds “to fully satisfy demand for Rural Health Care Program funding” for 2025, said a public notice Wednesday. The FCC’s rules for the RHC Program “establish a process to carry forward unused funds from past funding years for use in future funding years.”
The shuttering of the North American Numbering Council (see 2506240074) could make it harder for the FCC and industry to deal with the problem of telephone number exhaustion and other issues overseen by the group for the last 30 years, former NANC officials told us. The NANC’s charter expires in September, and its last meeting was Tuesday. Members learned of the decision to end the long-standing advisory committee about two weeks ago, said 15-year NANC veteran Richard Shockey, board chairman of the SIP Forum.
With the cost of space travel decreasing, regulatory hang-ups are starting to eclipse launch costs as the biggest barrier to commercial space, SpaceX Vice President of Satellite Policy David Goldman said Wednesday. Regulatory challenges are "where the bottleneck is," he said at a space and spectrum conference at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.
President Donald Trump would have issued an order ending collective bargaining for the FCC and numerous other federal agencies even if he didn’t have retaliatory motives, the White House said Monday in filings in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The filings were made in the National Treasury Employees Union’s challenge of Trump’s executive order that removed collective bargaining rights at roughly 40 agencies on national security grounds, affecting two-thirds of the federal workforce (see 2506100045). They included a motion for summary judgment, as well as a response to NTEU's own motion for summary judgment.
The North American Numbering Council said Tuesday that it wouldn't be rechartered after its final meeting that day, and its functions will be absorbed into the FCC. The advisory committee has operated since 1995, and its charter expires Sept. 8.
House Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., said Tuesday that it’s “time to have a real conversation and update the 1992 Cable Act,” a revamp that would likely take aim at retransmission consent, must-carry and network non-duplication rules, lobbyists said. The lawmaker announced plans to revisit the statute during a Media Institute event, saying it was part of a broader “modernization” of U.S. media laws, in tandem with the FCC Media Bureau’s move to seek comment on relaxing national broadcast-ownership limits (see 2506200052).
The existence of more precise location data and the value in accurately assessing compliance warrant the FCC granting GCI's request for modification or waiver of the Alaska population-distribution model (see 2504140020), GCI representatives told agency staffers. In a docket 16-271 filing posted Monday to recap a meeting with the Wireless Bureau and Office of Economics and Analytics, GCI said it expects it will meet its population-based commitments to upgrade service to nearly 140,000 Alaskans, and it seeks accurate measurement of compliance with Alaska Plan commitments. GCI also said it discussed Alaska Plan compliance regarding the relocation of population from the village of Newtok in western Alaska a few miles upriver to Mertarvik.