CenturyLink Also Seeks Stay of ICS Rate Caps; Customer Teleconnect Seeks Cost Reconsideration
CenturyLink became the latest inmate calling service provider seeking a stay of the FCC’s rate caps on domestic ICS calls, pending judicial review on the merits of an underlying legal challenge. “A stay is warranted because the rate caps will…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
prevent CenturyLink from recovering its reasonable cost of providing ICS to multiple facilities in several jurisdictions,” the company said in a petition to the commission in docket 12-375. The caps thus violate Communications Act requirements, including that ICS providers be “fairly compensated,” and will cause the CenturyLink irreparable harm, the company said. The Martha Wright Petitioners asked the FCC to give parties until Wednesday to respond to the stay request. The CenturyLink petition was dated Jan. 22 but not received by the FCC and posted electronically this week until Wednesday. CenturyLink said expeditious review is particularly important because the commission could rule soon on the stay petitions of other ICS providers; in fact, the Wireline Bureau denied those petitions Jan. 22 (see 1601220040). Global Tel*Link and Securus Technologies have since asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for a stay of various ICS rules, including the rate caps (see 1601220040). Separately, Customer Teleconnect, a wholesale telecom provider, asked the FCC to reconsider its order to the extent it "purports to rely on" the company's cost data as an example of an "efficient" ICS provider. "The cost information submitted in good faith by Custom Teleconnect represents the costs that the company incurs to provide a limited number of wholesale calling functions that may be used by ICS providers, but these functions ... do not represent a complete end-to-end ICS service," the company said in a letter posted in the docket. The FCC's "extensive reliance" on the cost information "is in error and misconstrues" the data, which doesn't reflect the full cost to provide inmate calling services, it said.