Congress, and the FCC, may face reduced pressure to reform the USF with an expected drop in its contribution factor, but calls for change won’t go away, experts said Monday. The USF contribution factor is expected to decline from 38.1% in Q4 to 30.9% in Q1, as projected demand decreases, analyst Billy Jack Gregg said Saturday in an email. That’s based on new numbers from the Universal Service Administrative Co.
As the longest federal government shutdown in history likely nears an end, industry lawyers who depend on FCC decisions said there’s no question the companies they represent have taken a hit. Among the biggest problems, they said, are that everything the FCC has done has taken longer, while some transactions and license applications aren’t being processed with key systems offline.
While state efforts to regulate AI are mushrooming, the Trump administration's plans to use FCC preemption powers to stop those efforts are unlikely to succeed, Phoenix Center President Larry Spiwak said in a paper last week. The administration's AI Action Plan, issued in July, directs the commission to evaluate whether state AI regulations interfere with its Communications Act obligations (see 2507230050). That presumably implies that the FCC should use its Section 253 and 332 authority to preempt those state laws, Spiwak said. But such efforts aren't likely to bear fruit, given the plain language of the Communications Act and recent case law, he argued. Instead, twisting the Communications Act for state AI law preemption "may open a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences, perversely leading to a vast expansion of the FCC’s powers beyond its limited statutory constraints." Political efforts should focus instead on enacting federal legislation that would give that preemption authority, he added.
Attorneys general from 18 states and the city of New York called on the FCC in a letter Friday to send already-approved rules for multilingual wireless emergency alerts to the Federal Register. The rules were issued in January by the Public Safety Bureau under the previous administration but haven’t been implemented in the intervening 10 months because they haven’t yet been published.
The National Emergency Number Association filed reply comments in the FCC's copper retirement proceeding last week, urging the agency to require carriers to continue supporting time-division multiplexing (TDM) as it moves to IP-based services. Next-generation 911 deployment “remains uneven, and many jurisdictions continue to rely on TDM for 9-1-1 today,” said a filing Thursday in docket 25-208. “During the transition to NG9-1-1, there is an interim period where both TDM-based Enhanced 9-1-1 and IP-based NG9-1-1 networks need to be maintained.”
The Senate was expected to vote late Friday on a motion to proceed to an amended version of the Shutdown Fairness Act (S-3012) as Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., predicted that the chamber would likely “be here for the weekend” for talks aimed at ending the government shutdown, which started Oct. 1 (see 2509300060).
The public interest standard “grants FCC officials too much unconstrained discretion in today's competitive media and telecommunications environment,” wrote Free State Foundation President Randolph May in a blog post Friday. Congress should update the Communications Act and “jettison” the public interest standard, he said, arguing that the economic circumstances and viewpoint diversity concerns that were used to justify the standard no longer apply. “Today, reliance on the dictates of competitive marketplace forces is much more likely to enhance consumer welfare -- and to be consistent with constitutional free speech and due process dictates -- than reliance on immodest bureaucratic diktats.”
The FCC on Thursday advised the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral argument last month on a challenge to the 2024 incarcerated people's communications services (IPCS) order, that the rules have changed. FCC commissioners significantly revised calling rates in an order approved 2-1 at the October open meeting (see 2510280045). The agency also released the final version of the order Thursday with some changes from the draft that was previously circulated by Chairman Brendan Carr, mostly benefiting IPCS providers.
Gray Media executives said in a Q3 earnings call Friday that the recent Democratic electoral wins will increase broadcasters' political ad revenue and that the company is waiting on the outcomes of FCC proceedings on ownership rules and pending Gray transactions to provide a clearer picture of the options for mergers and acquisitions. “Things are changing faster than I've ever, ever seen it, and for the first time in the history of our business, we are really operating in the wild, wild West,” said co-CEO Hilton Howell. “No one knows what the rules actually are.”
Europe’s history of protectionist activity in areas like Big Tech and its General Data Protection Regulation is potentially now edging into space, such as through the EU Space Act, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said Friday at a Federalist Society event in Washington. The U.S. and EU should instead be working together on space activity in the face of Chinese space ambitions, Carr added.