The California Public Utilities Commission again delayed votes on an AT&T enforcement item and another proposal to make a foster youth program permanent. Both were scheduled for Thursday’s meeting, but staff postponed them until the April 18 meeting, said a CPUC hold list Tuesday. CPUC President Alice Reynolds previously asked to address the AT&T item at a Feb. 15 meeting (see 2402150067). It would deny the carrier’s corrective action plan explaining how it will correct failures and improve service after failing to meet the state’s out-of-service repair interval standard in 2021. In addition, the CPUC originally planned a Feb. 15 vote on the foster youth proposal but twice postponed it. Earlier this month, the agency received a dire warning from the foster youth pilot program’s administrator, iFoster (see 2403110042), which said the current draft would create a program “destined to fail.”
Public interest groups and two academics urged the FCC to update its approach to net neutrality rules to address issues concerning new services like network slicing, which industry, particularly T-Mobile (see 2402260058), has raised. “Open Internet protections primarily focus on providers’ practices when providing broadband Internet access service [BIAS],” the filing said: “But ever since the FCC first adopted comprehensive open Internet protections in 2010, the agency has recognized that other services that are delivered over the same last-mile connection … may also undermine the open Internet, harming innovation, competition, investment, and user choice.” The FCC should consider how the service is defined “in the first sentence of the BIAS definition … or a functional equivalent of regular BIAS,” advocates said. The technology shouldn’t harm the open internet “by negatively affecting the capacity available for, and the performance of, BIAS, either dynamically or over time” or “have the purpose or effect of evading Open Internet protections,” the filing said. The filing was made by the Open Technology Institute at New America; Public Knowledge; Barbara van Schewick, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society; and Scott Jordan, computer science professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Prepare for more California privacy activity in coming months, California Privacy Protection Agency Senior Privacy Counsel Lisa Kim said Wednesday. Kim previewed CPPA enforcement, rulemaking and legislative work at a virtual FCBA privacy symposium Wednesday. A growing patchwork of state privacy laws makes it difficult for businesses to create a good consumer experience for making privacy choices, said corporate privacy practitioners during a later panel.
The California Public Utilities Commission scrapped its procedural schedule for AT&T’s petition seeking statewide relief from carrier of last resort (COLR) obligations. The commission will release a new schedule after April 30, which is the due date for possible replacement COLRs to notify the CPUC that they want to replace AT&T in particular areas, Administrative Law Judge Thomas Glegola ruled Tuesday in docket A.23-03-003. An evidentiary hearing was slated for April 23-25 under the previous, now-discarded schedule. AT&T urged the commission not to waste time seeking replacement COLRs last month (see 2402210038).
Social media companies should obtain parental consent before sending children push notifications that keep them on platforms, a bipartisan group of 43 state attorneys general told the FTC in comments due Monday (see 2312280030). Some tech and telecom groups warned that the FTC's push-notification proposal is likely to be unconstitutional and outside its statutory authority.
The California Public Utilities Commission received warnings Friday about how the CPUC plans to make a foster-youth pilot a permanent part of the California LifeLine program. IFoster, the pilot’s administrator, said the current draft is “unconscionable” and would create a program “destined to fail.” The CPUC "is about to take a successful Digital Equity program and destroy it while also making ineligible foster youth as they age out of foster care, the very time they need a communications device most to obtain housing, food, and apply for jobs,” the nonprofit iFoster commented in R.20-02-008. Moreover, it said the revised proposal “will result in 12,000 foster youth losing what has been to date a life-saving resource that they describe as a lifeline, a bright spot in their lives, and a necessity for their vital communications.” It's wrong for the CPUC to try to conform the program to the state's “ill-fitting regular LifeLine program,” which “routinely rejects foster youth.” Also, using the traditional LifeLine model would mean removing the mandate for providing a device for foster youth and "no requirements for high speed or unlimited data or hotspot capability,” said iFoster. Neither T-Mobile nor affiliate Assurance Wireless will participate in the proposed permanent program, T-Mobile commented. The revised proposal "still does not address how -- or whether -- current Pilot Program participants will receive service" after the pilot expires July 31, T-Mobile cautioned. Cox supported making the program a permanent part of California LifeLine. But the CPUC shouldn't assign the program its own minimum service standards or specific support amounts, the cable company said. The CPUC had planned to vote Feb. 15 on an earlier proposal but twice postponed the item. The commission now plans voting on the revised proposal at its March 21 meeting (see 2402290056 and 2403050016).
The FCC has announced the membership of the rechartered Intergovernmental Advisory Committee in a public notice and news release Monday. Composed of elected officials from municipal, county, state and tribal governments, the IAC is focused on advising the FCC on telecom issues that affect those entities. “These local, county, state, and Tribal leaders offer the Commission valuable perspectives on how we can work together to connect the American people,” said Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in the release. The IAC has 30 new and returning members, including Chair and Michigan Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist (D) and Vice Chair Marshall Pierite, who is chairman-CEO of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. The group also includes the governors of North Carolina, Wisconsin and South Carolina, the mayors of Washington, D.C.; Pasadena, California; and North Miami, Florida, and numerous other public officials. The first IAC meeting will be held on April 18.
The California Privacy Protection Agency could open formal rulemaking in July on draft regulations related to cybersecurity, risk assessments, automated decision-making and updating privacy rules, CPPA General Counsel Phillip Laird said Friday. The rulemaking would likely conclude in 2025, he said at a partially virtual meeting. Before the rulemaking starts, CPPA plans a “roadshow” across California to engage with and encourage broad public participation, he said. The board discussed revised, pre-rulemaking proposals on the latter three issues, which privacy experts say could affect many industries, including communications and the internet (see 2312060021). It gave staff a green light to move ahead on the cybersecurity rules last December (see 2312080064), but this summer’s rulemaking would take up all four items as a package. Recent CPPA revisions tightened automated decision-making draft rules, McDermott Will privacy lawyers David Saunders and Cathy Lee blogged March 1. For example, the definition of automated decision-making “in the last iteration was so broad so as to include calculators or even spreadsheet formulas,” they said. Board member Alastair Mactaggart raised that concern at a December meeting. The current draft “expressly excludes ordinary technologies … so long as they are not used in a manner that replaces human decision-making. Ambiguity remains, however, as to what happens if one of the excluded technologies is used to facilitate human decision-making.”
The California Public Utilities Commission voted 4-0 at its open meeting Thursday to adopt changes to the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) broadband public housing account and tribal technical assistance program (docket R.20-08-021). CPUC Commissioner Matthew Baker, appointed Feb. 16, recused himself from the vote because he was previously director of the CPUC’s independent Public Advocates Office, which participated in the proceeding. The order, as revised March 4, includes clarifying that public housing broadband grant recipients should provide free service without government subsidies, among other things (see 2401290059). "To meet our goal to close the digital divide and provide equal opportunity to all Californians, we need to make sure that we can allocate funds in an efficient manner that can meet the needs of our diverse communities,” said Commissioner Darcie Houck, who was assigned to lead the docket. "This decision has been in the works for a long time and is a product of extensive engagement with a diverse group of stakeholders and community groups.” It’s important that public housing receives free broadband service, said President Alice Reynolds as she supported the order.
Maryland could be the next state that makes prison phone calls free, but only if lawmakers accept the proposal’s expected costs, estimated at $7.4 million. The state’s House Judiciary Committee mulled a no-cost prison calls bill (HB-1366) at a Thursday hearing, two days after the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee heard testimony on a companion bill (SB-948).