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).
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.