FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will come to Capitol Hill for his seventh hearing of the year next week, this time before Senate appropriators. The leadership of the Senate Appropriations Financial Services Subcommittee told us they plan to bring Wheeler for a hearing May 12, both expecting net neutrality to come up in some form. But Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., is trying to ward off GOP appropriators from tackling the FCC’s net neutrality order through the funding process.
The FCC said it may fine Simple Network $100,000 for "allegedly providing interstate telecommunications services without registering with the FCC through the Universal Service Administrative Company." The company's alleged registration failure allowed it to avoid making payments that support federal programs, including the USF, potentially creating higher fees for others that do register, said an FCC release and an Enforcement Bureau notice of apparent liability Monday.
The Supreme Court said it won't hear appeals of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision a year ago upholding the FCC’s requirement that USF recipients provide broadband. Industry officials said the decision was a big positive for the FCC because if the court agreed to hear the case it would have meant many months of uncertainty for the FCC’s landmark November 2011 order “modernizing” USF and the intercarrier compensation regime. The Monday court order also shifted the fund to support broadband as well as traditional voice service.
Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., is still collecting lawmaker signatures on his draft letter to the FCC pushing stand-alone broadband USF support, an aide to Cramer said Friday. In recent weeks, Cramer, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., have quietly sought support from colleagues for a pair of such bicameral draft letters (see 1504210033). NTCA framed the letters’ goal as a lobbying priority and recently hosted several of its members in Washington to lobby lawmakers. Cramer initially set Friday as a tentative deadline for gathering signatures but he has extended that to May 8, the aide said. Last Congress, a similar House letter snagged several scores of lawmaker signatures.
ISPs likely will follow many net neutrality rules, even if February's FCC order (see 1504100046) is overturned by a court or overridden by Congress, said two lawyers on different sides of the issue. The order's prohibition on blocking or throttling likely will be followed by broadband providers even absent rules, said Center for Democracy & Technology General Counsel Erik Stallman, who supports the order, and Convergence Law Institute Vice President Solveig Singleton, who calls herself skeptical of net neutrality. Speaking Thursday at a Reed College legal network event, they said experimentation with paid prioritization might happen without the order, which bans it unless a waiver allows certain content to receive higher priority. Real-time video could be subject to such experimentation if allowed, Singleton said. ISPs "view the Internet as essentially a two-sided market, and they would like the ability to charge both sides of the market" through paid prioritization, Stallman said.
The FCC could be headed for a vote at its June 18 meeting on a rulemaking reshaping the Lifeline program, including providing support for Internet access, agency and industry officials said. With a light agenda at both the April and May meetings, Chairman Tom Wheeler appears likely to take on a bigger, more controversial issue in June, and Lifeline changes could be ready for a vote, the officials said.
Charles Benton, 84, died at home in Evanston, Illinois, Wednesday of cancer. He chaired the Benton Foundation, which he founded in 1981 with a grant from his father. At the foundation, he advocated for regulation on media and telecom matters such as broadcast ownership and the USF. President Jimmy Carter named Benton chairman of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and of the first White House conference on library and information services. President Bill Clinton appointed him to the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. And President Barack Obama named him to the board of the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Benton is survived by his wife, two children, including daughter Adrianne Furniss, who is the Benton Foundation's executive director, a sister and five grandchildren. Funeral and other arrangements are pending.
The U.S. needs universal service support for broadband-only lines to avoid significant customer rate increases, WTA said in a meeting Monday with the FCC Wireline Bureau about the data connection service plan proposal, according to an ex parte filing posted Thursday in docket 10-90. WTA said it expressed concerns about the potential ways in which limitations on capital and operating expenses can satisfy FCC principles and goals regarding the use of forward-looking costs in its universal service mechanisms. Wednesday, the FCC said it would give 10 telcos up to $10.1 billion over six years for deploying broadband to rural areas under USF (see 1504300029 and 1504290066).
Windstream joined other telcos offered as much as $10.1 billion total over six years from the FCC to deploy broadband to rural areas in saying it's analyzing the USF offers (see 1504290066). "In the coming days and months Windstream will be busy analyzing the statewide offers to determine where its own investment combined with the offered support is sufficient to meet the program’s obligations or where Windstream instead will be compelled by economics to move to the competitive bidding stage," said Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Eric Einhorn in a statement Wednesday. The telcos have until Aug. 27 to decide whether to accept the money state by state, and where they decline, subsidies will be offered on what the agency called a competitive basis. "The task of extending broadband networks to these remote areas will take some years," said USTelecom President Walter McCormick.
USTelecom urged the FCC to reconsider parts of its December E-rate order, particularly rules allowing self-provisioning by schools and libraries and the need for additional safeguards to ensure efficient spending in the USF program. USTelecom said it agrees with many of the questions raised about the order by Cox Communications in a March petition for reconsideration. The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition defended the order, saying allowing schools and libraries to receive money to lease dark fiber or build their own facilities was a badly needed innovation. The filings were posted in docket 13-184.