Congress should revamp the Communications Act to account for the “Digital Age,” doing away with the siloing of different industries at the FCC and replacing the public interest standard, wrote Free State Foundation President Randolph May in an op-ed Friday for Real Clear Markets. The FCC’s separation of industries into different bureaus -- which May called “the stovepipe regulatory framework” -- is “woefully outdated,” he said. “These regulatory stovepipes don't make sense in today's digital environment characterized by relentless technological innovation and marketplace convergence” and “impede efforts to allow comparable services to compete with each other without unfair advantages conferred by outdated regulatory distinctions.”
The FCC could investigate public media stations for running ads against legislation that would rescind federal funding from NPR and PBS, said FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a post on X Thursday night. Carr’s post came a little more than an hour after President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that he wouldn’t endorse Republican lawmakers who voted to support funding for PBS and NPR.
T-Mobile’s purchase of wireless assets from UScellular, which has been pending since May of last year, got two key clearances in two days. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced Friday (see 2507110065) that the Wireless Bureau approved the transaction. Late Thursday, DOJ announced it won’t oppose the deal, which includes about 30% of UScellular's spectrum and all its wireless customers and stores.
Tegna has agreed to a $222,500 settlement with the FCC over an Oct. 2021 incident where a 13-second clip of pornographic material was played on a monitor visible behind an anchor during an evening news weather segment, said an order and consent decree in Thursday’s Daily Digest. Tegna told the FCC that an unknown person used the monitor’s screencasting feature to transmit and display the material while on a legacy wireless network that, unknown to the station's IT team, didn’t require a password. After the incident, Tegna deactivated the network, disabled screencasting on all monitors at all its stations and began requiring that all new monitors be installed without Wi-Fi capabilities, the consent decree said. Under its terms, Tegna agreed to create a compliance plan and file compliance reports with the FCC for the next three years. In 2016, then-Schurz-owned WDBJ Roanoke, Virginia, paid a $325,000 FCC forfeiture after it aired an image that contained pornography during a news story about a firefighter’s adult film career (see 1604040057). Schurz appealed the amount but eventually paid in order to close its sale to Gray Television.
Fourteen groups signed a letter Thursday urging the FCC to reject NAB’s push for an ATSC 3.0 tuner mandate. The groups -- which include Digital Liberty, Americans for Tax Reform, the James Madison Institute and the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, as well as two individual signers -- said ATSC 3.0 already reaches three out of four Americans. “By any reasonable standard this is a success,” and broadcaster arguments that the 3.0 transition is in jeopardy without FCC intervention are “flimsy.” The agency “should maintain its voluntary, market driven adoption policy that has reached the vast majority of Americans, not embrace a mandate just to reach the small minority of markets broadcasters have struggled to penetrate,” the letter said. “While broadcasters operate under the strain of onerous regulations dating from the Second World War, new mandates on other technologies are not the solution.”
NextNav filed at the FCC a supplement to its early engineering report, addressing interference issues raised by the company’s proposal that the FCC reconfigure the 902-928 MHz band “to enable a high-quality, terrestrial complement” to GPS for positioning, navigation and timing services (see 2503030023). The supplement filing, posted Thursday in docket 25-110, slammed critics of the earlier report (see 2504280045).
GCI representatives met with an aide to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr concerning the company’s petition seeking clarity of the agency's Alaska Connect Fund mobile requirements (see 2501310053). Part of the filing, posted Thursday in docket 23-328, was redacted. As GCI and the Alaska Remote Carrier Coalition “have made clear, it is not possible to extend 5G-[new radio] at 7/1 or 35/3 Mbps to the edge of the voice service areas reached by the Alaska Plan,” the filing said. “Even excluding voice-only areas, Alaska providers will need significant flexibility and, as such, the general expectations should be more realistically calibrated in light of the nature of Alaska’s communities and the realities of wireless signal propagation and attenuation.”
In light of Congress restoring FCC auction authority, Ligado said on Thursday it’s time for the commission to address the 1675-1680 MHz band, the topic of a record refresh this year (see 1905090041). “Since 2019 the Commission has studied how to reallocate the 1675-1680 MHz band for shared federal and commercial use, and recent submissions by [NTIA] clearly establish that the band can be used for both uplink and downlink and shared with Government users,” Ligado said in docket 19-116. The opportunity to make the band available for shared use “is the fruit” of the Wireless Bureau’s “diligent efforts to refresh the record in this proceeding over the first half of this year.”
The 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals Court agreed Thursday to hold in abeyance a legal challenge to an FCC ruling that lets schools and libraries use E-rate support for off-premises Wi-Fi hot spots and wireless internet services. The court's action came after the FCC reminded it that the agency's composition has changed since it adopted the school bus Wi-Fi ruling in 2023, and the current commission may no longer support the order (see 2507070012).
The FCC Office of International Affairs has signed off on the requested transfer of the PPC-1 submarine cable landing license from one Australian company, TPG Telecom, to another, Vocus Group, as part of Vocus' purchase of TPG's subsea cable business (see 2411150001), said a public notice Thursday. PPC-1 connects Sydney to Piti, Guam.