Communications Daily is tracking the lawsuits below involving appeals of FCC actions.
House lawmakers from both parties continued Wednesday to criticize new Senate language in the package to end the government shutdown (HR-5371) that would allow senators to sue federal agencies in response to reports of DOJ spying on some Republican lawmakers' phone records during the Biden administration. The Senate-approved provision targeted claims that the FBI and former Special Counsel Jack Smith accessed the phone records of several Republican lawmakers as part of the Biden administration’s probe of the Jan. 6 Capitol siege (see 2510170039). The House was set to vote Wednesday night on HR-5371, which could lead the FCC to restart most of its operations Thursday. The FCC suspended most of its functions when the government shutdown began Oct. 1. and furloughed 81% of its staff (see 2510010065). The Senate passed HR-5371 Monday night 60-40.
ACA Connects hopes to use the FCC's wide-reaching wireline deployment rules reform proceeding to pursue permitting reforms and stop local rate regulation efforts that Congress isn't currently tackling, President Grant Spellmeyer told reporters Wednesday. Brian Hurley, the group's senior vice president of legal and regulatory affairs, said that given the priority that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has put on speeding up deployment, ACA expects to see action in 2026 coming out of the wireline proceeding.
Arpan Sura, an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, warned Wednesday that the agency faces a huge amount of work to meet a congressional mandate to auction the upper C band in two years. “It’s a very aggressive timeline,” Sura said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies conference. Other speakers said federal spectrum work has continued despite the longest federal shutdown in history. Commissioners are to vote next week on an upper C-band NPRM (see 2510290047).
Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and other witnesses at a Public Knowledge event Wednesday called for Congress to end what they see as actions by Chairman Brendan Carr's commission infringing media's First Amendment rights. PK CEO Chris Lewis framed the event as the first in an anticipated series of “people’s oversight” hearings on the FCC and other federal agencies in response to what he sees as Congress’ failure to counter Trump administration actions against the president's perceived enemies.
The U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear a Connecticut low-power TV broadcaster’s legal challenge of the FCC’s implementation of the 2023 Low Power Protection Act (see 2509290043). SCOTUS on Monday denied the petition for a writ of certiorari from Radio Communications Corp. (RCC), which asked the high court in September to overturn a unanimous ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejecting the company's arguments. RCC had argued that Congress intended the Low Power Protection Act to broadly allow many LPTV stations nationwide to upgrade to Class A status, though the text of the statute explicitly limited the upgrade to stations in markets of up to 95,000 households. The FCC order used nearly identical language to the statute, but RCC argued that the agency twisted Congress’ intent to protect full-power stations. “RCC’s convoluted reading of these statutory provisions is plainly incorrect,” said the D.C. Circuit in its June opinion.
The FCC should ask additional questions on automatic speech recognition (ASR) captions in its draft telecommunications relay service NPRM, ClearCaptions told an aide to Commissioner Olivia Trusty last week, according to a filing posted Monday in docket 03-123. The NPRM, set for the agency’s Nov. 20 open meeting, already asks about the quality of ASR functions on smart devices but “does not seek comment on key questions.” The agency should also inquire about the availability of ASR on smart devices, the costs of such devices, performance monitoring, and the FCC’s jurisdiction to impose minimum standards for consumer use of ASR on such devices, the filing said. In addition, the FCC should ask about privacy, technical support availability and what parties would be responsible for providing it, ClearCaptions said.
The main new information in the final version of the FCC’s incarcerated people's communications services order, released last week (see 2511070027), is that the inflation factor has added 1 or 2 cents to most of the rate caps, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative said in an email. “We didn't know before what the final impact of that factor was going to be.” The group updated an earlier blog post on the order to reflect that information.
The Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy urged the FCC on Monday to adopt policies making it easier for carriers to retire legacy copper lines (see 2510010031). Discontinuance rules were crafted in the Communications Act of 1934, noted the center's filing in docket 25-209. The rapid spread of AI technologies “will inevitably drive essentially all businesses to seek to both reduce costs and improve the quality of the goods and services they provide,” it added. The move from narrowband copper to broadband “has facilitated consumers’ ability to consume voice, data, and video services with speeds and quality that [were] unthinkable only a few short years ago.”
The Senate Commerce Committee said Friday night that it plans to hold a much-anticipated FCC oversight hearing Dec. 17. Panel Democrats have been pressing since late September for Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to bring in FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to face questions about his mid-September comments against ABC and parent Disney, which were widely perceived as instigating the network’s since-reversed decision to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the air (see 2509220059). Cruz was among several Republicans who also criticized Carr’s comments (see 2509190059).