Proposal for NGSO Tiered Regulatory Fee Gets Praise, Pushback
The satellite industry still isn't finding common ground on whether the FCC should vary regulatory fees for different types of non-geostationary orbit constellations rather than charge one $223,500 annual fee for all NGSOs (see 2006300070). Docket 20-105 comments last week also showed some disagreements about whether size matters when it comes to bigger constellations requiring more regulatory resources.
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.
Charging different regulatory fees to NGSO satellite service would reflect the differences in the benefits of FCC activities to the regulated and more fairly account for market size differences in different services, Planet Labs said. NGSO fixed satellite service proceedings and matters take up more FCC resources than mobile satellite services and earth exploration satellite services, it said. Meanwhile, EESSs seemingly have never been subject of a rulemaking proceeding and typically aren't involved in contentious application proceedings, nor are they generally subject to onerous international coordination processes, it said. Also backing a tiered fee system for different NGSO services, Myriota said there have been active NGSO fixed satellite service adjudications the past two to three years, but the FCC has spent few resources on other NGSOs. It said the FCC should use the fee proceeding to recognize the differences in costs and benefits associated with different NGSO system categories.
Loft Orbital said the annual regulatory fee is "substantial" given its relatively modest business plans of cubesats for IoT services such as livestock tracking. It said different categories of NGSO regulatory fees would lower costs to smallsat companies and make it easier for them to operate.
Since orbital debris is also a sort of interference, NGSO systems should be charged regulatory fees via a model that accounts for their desired bandwidth, the "value" of that band and aggregate orbital mass, Kepler said. It said "the amount of conflict" possible between an NGSO system and other operators is a yardstick for how much FCC resources it would require, and the bigger the constellation, the more risk to other operators. The same goes for systems using heavily populated spectrum bands, it said.
Charging a nominal regulatory fee for NGSO constellations communicating with five or fewer U.S.-licensed earth stations for telemetry, tracking and control, and non-domestic data downlink purposes accounts for FCC personnel labor and also would promote U.S. competitiveness in commercial space by encouraging novel space-based applications, like EESS, to contract with U.S. earth stations for domestic downlinking, Amazon said.
Opposing the separate NGSO categories, Telesat said such fees would mean "complexity and uncertainty," and there's no evidence the different NGSO systems use materially different amounts of regulatory resources, or that a system's size correlates to use of regulatory resources. Unsurprisingly, everyone advocating for different NGSO fee categories would pay lower fees, and their competitors would pay more, SpaceX said, calling groundless the argument that some NGSO categories take more time to process.
Satellite operators seeking a tiered system haven't shown cost basis to justify moving from a uniform $223,500 annual regulatory fee for all NGSO systems, SES/O3b said. Assertions that some types of NGSO systems carry higher regulatory costs are "mere generalizations" that don't jibe with FCC experience overseeing the networks, it said.