Conservative group the Center for American Rights has joined with Fuse Media and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in asking the FCC to “avoid rubber-stamping Skydance’s proposed $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global and hold Skydance accountable for keeping its public interest commitments,” according to a joint ex parte filing Tuesday. CAR President Daniel Suhr and attorney David Goodfriend -- who represents Fuse and the Teamsters -- met with Commissioner Nathan Simington, acting Media Bureau Chief Erin Boone, and aides to Commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Anna Gomez in a call Tuesday. “Each of us filed comments addressing very different issues in this transaction but with the same goal: making sure that Skydance lives up to statements it made to the FCC,” said the filing. CAR and Goodfriend’s clients said they believe Skydance should provide more details to the agency and be held accountable, the filing said. Both groups in the ex parte filing listed possible conditions the FCC should impose on Skydance. CAR, which filed the news distortion complaint against CBS, wants Skydance held to commitments on unbiased news and said the FCC should require more viewpoint diversity on the New Paramount board, editorial staff located in cities besides New York and Los Angeles, and a well-funded oversight board or ombudsman. The Teamsters and Fuse want the agency to require collective bargaining agreements with all employees and reserve programming services on PlutoTV and other streaming platforms for independently owned content providers.
The FCC’s authority to regulate broadcast content is based on the scarcity of spectrum, but that authority is unconstitutional because spectrum’s scarcity doesn’t differentiate it from other resources such as land or oil, wrote Joe Kane, director-broadband and spectrum policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in an essay the Federalist Society posted Tuesday. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s actions (see 2502050063) to investigate broadcasters over their content “are permitted within the current state of the law” because of court rulings that broadcasters enjoy fewer First Amendment protections due to spectrum’s scarcity, Kane said. “Those cases, and therefore the FCC’s authority to regulate the content transmitted over radio waves, are based on fundamental fallacies,” he wrote. “Land is scarce, but the fact that the government has granted or auctioned deeds doesn’t permit it to regulate the content of what landowners say.” The law also doesn’t apply the rationale of spectrum scarcity evenly, Kane pointed out. Wi-Fi signals are just as susceptible to interference as broadcast radio signals, he said. “Yet no one would countenance content-based control of all wireless internet traffic, even though the scarcity rationale would apply identically to those types of transmissions.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas questioned the validity of the spectrum scarcity rationale in his concurrence in FCC v. Fox, Kane said. “Do his colleagues agree?” he asked. “Spectrum is not so special a medium that it should be carved out of the First Amendment,” he wrote. “To the extent that any FCC action or any part of the Communications Act relies on the inverse assumption, it is unconstitutional.”
The FCC asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit not to impose a mandate on the regulator to start the process of authorizing gear by China’s Hikvision. Hikvision and Dahua won a partial victory last year (see 2404020068) when the D.C. Circuit held that the FCC’s definition of critical infrastructure in a 2022 order was “overly broad.” Judges also rejected arguments that video cameras and video-surveillance equipment manufactured by the companies shouldn’t have been placed on the agency’s “covered list” of unsecure gear.
EchoStar Chief Technology Officer Eben Albertyn and others from the company met with FCC staff to urge the agency to increase citizens broadband radio service power levels and align other rules with global 3 GHz standards. EchoStar engineers discussed technical studies that the company has already submitted and that justify each of the changes proposed, said a Tuesday filing in docket 17-258. The EchoStar representatives said they met with staff from the Wireless Bureau and Office of Engineering and Technology. A broad group of companies and associations last week urged new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr not to make sweeping changes to the rules for the band (see 2502060050).
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's criticism of how the 5G Fund was structured under former Chairwoman Rosenworcel is “legitimate,” New Street’s Blair Levin said in an email (see 2502100056). “Congress asked Rosenworcel to lay out an analysis of the future of USF post-BEAD in order to have the data Congress and the public would need to evaluate what needs to be done now and what should await the implementation of BEAD,” Levin said. “Rosenworcel's efforts did not accomplish that (or anything else) which is unfortunate.” While some parts of the fund could be done now, “others, no doubt, would benefit from knowing how the states' plans affect future deployment efforts,” he said.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Tuesday upheld a lower court’s dismissal of additional False Claims Act actions brought by lawyers Mark O’Connor and Sara Leibman, who allege that UScellular and other defendants fraudulently claimed that Frequency Advantage was a “very small business” qualifying for “designated entity” status and a bidding discount in FCC auctions (see 2303280061). Other defendants include King Street Wireless, Carroll Wireless and Barat Wireless. The case “must be dismissed because the frauds Leibman and O’Connor allege were publicly disclosed in an earlier lawsuit, and they are not original sources of the information,” Judge Neomi Rao wrote in a decision in docket 23-7044. “We therefore affirm the judgment of the district court.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., filed the Defund Government Sponsored Propaganda Act on Tuesday in a bid to end federal funding for NPR and PBS. The measure would also claw back CPB’s advance funding for fiscal years 2025, 2026 and 2027 “to reduce the public debt.” The legislation’s filing follows FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s January call for the Enforcement and Media bureaus to investigate PBS and NPR member stations over possible underwriting violations (see 2501300065). The House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee is eyeing a March hearing on public broadcasting (see 2502030064). House Appropriations Committee Republicans attempted to end CPB's advance funding in 2023 and 2024 (see 2407100060). “Americans have hundreds of sources of news and commentary, and they don’t need politically biased, taxpayer-funded media choosing what they should see and hear,” Lee said. “PBS and NPR are free to compete in the marketplace of ideas using donations, but their public subsidy should end.” NPR and PBS “have chosen advocacy over accuracy, using public dollars to promote a political agenda rather than report the facts,” Tenney said. “The Defund Government Sponsored Propaganda Act ensures that federal funding is no longer used to perpetuate the blatant media bias that has overtaken these platforms.” NPR and PBS didn't immediately comment.
Three conservative groups on Tuesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to use its upcoming decision in FCC v. Consumers' Research to provide clarity on when agencies can delegate authority to private companies. SCOTUS will consider the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ 9-7 en banc decision invalidating part of the USF program (see 2501090045), in part because the FCC delegated authority for overseeing the program to the Universal Service Administrative Co. (see 2412100060).
A legal challenge to the FCC's over-the-air reception devices (OTARD) rules might face procedural problems, a federal judge said Tuesday. But the three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also seemed skeptical during oral argument (docket 24-1108) of the commission's creating a "human presence" requirement in its OTARD rules for Indian Peak Properties. The company is appealing an FCC order that denied its petitions for declaratory ruling. Indian Peak was seeking a federal preemption under the OTARD rule of a Rancho Palos Verdes, California, decision to revoke its local permit for the deployment of rooftop antennas on a property (see 2405060035).
The FCC faces pressure to find a better, more market-oriented way to reallocate spectrum, but there are no obvious solutions in sight, auction experts said Tuesday. The discussion, during a Technology Policy Institute webinar, the first in its series on spectrum policy, comes as the fight over spectrum heats up, and the administration looks at the future of the lower 3 GHz, 7/8 GHz and other bands (see 2502100047).