Industry Groups Argue Against Overhaul of Emergency Alerting
Industry groups and companies don’t want the FCC to overhaul emergency alerting, but public safety communications officials are calling on the agency to expand alerting to streaming and additional devices, according to reply comments posted last week (docket 25-224) in response to an August NPRM (see 2508070037). CTIA, NAB, T-Mobile and alerting equipment manufacturer Digital Alert Systems said wireless emergency alerts (WEAs) and the emergency alert system (EAS) already meet the FCC’s objectives. However, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) said alerts need to be delivered through the media platforms that people most commonly use.
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"The EAS already meets the goals the NPRM sets out for it,” said a joint filing from state broadcast associations. “The broadcast industry is evolving public alerting capabilities and should be allowed to continue to do so on a voluntary basis.”
Wireless industry groups made similar arguments on WEAs. “The record demonstrates that the WEA system meets the Commission’s objectives for a national alerting system,” said CTIA. “Rather than pursue a costly redesign of the system,” the FCC “should ensure the WEA system continues to evolve by supporting flexible, stakeholder-led innovation and collaboration.”
Digital Alert Systems argued that the EAS “is an unfunded federal mandate, and modernization proposals that impose new costs on broadcasters, cable operators, or equipment manufacturers without financial support risk undermining system sustainability.”
“If the federal government were to design an alerting system from the ground up today," APCO said, "it stands to reason that it would be sure to include the platforms where the majority of the public consumes content.” The FCC should “modernize emergency alerts by aligning their distribution with modern media consumption” by implementing delivery over streaming video and audio.
The Motion Picture Association and the Digital Media Association disagreed in a joint filing, saying that requiring alerts in streaming content is “technically infeasible and legally unsustainable.” Congress “has not provided the Commission with authority to require streaming providers to transmit emergency alerts.”
But APCO argued that the FCC “should carefully evaluate claims” about technical barriers to streaming alerts, and then “consider the substantial public safety benefits that might accrue from such improvements and require service providers to conclusively support any asserted burdens.” The FCC sought comment on expanding alerting to streaming in 2021 but never followed up with a rulemaking.
APCO also said the agency should enable the inclusion of multimedia content in alerts, especially WEAs. “The ability to include multimedia in WEA messages, such as a photo of a missing child in an AMBER Alert, would yield significant lifesaving benefits."
T-Mobile, however, said redesigning WEAs would “take time to implement, be unfamiliar to alert originators, create unnecessary costs, and may produce unintended adverse public safety impacts.” Digital Alert Systems likewise said proposals to add multimedia elements or mandatory video alerts to the EAS would “impose undue costs and technical burdens.” The FCC “should affirm that enhanced content, such as maps, icons, multilingual text, and video, should be permissive, and that no participant shall be required to transmit or render such media as a condition of compliance.”
The Office of New York state Attorney General Letitia James filed reply comments focused on the FCC’s multilingual alerting rules for WEAs. James joined numerous other state AGs in a letter earlier this month threatening legal action over the multilingual alerting order (see 2511070042). It's “puzzling” that the FCC’s NPRM on overhauling alerting doesn’t mention the multilingual alerts order that the agency approved in January but has yet to forward to the Federal Register, the AG filing said.
NAB, Digital Alert Systems and APCO all said the FCC should convene stakeholders to look at any revamp of alerting procedures. NAB suggested “a public-private advisory committee of experts to study some of the thorny questions” of advancing alerting, while DAS called for a “National Advisory Council” similar to the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council. “This would provide the durable, public-private engine necessary to deliver precise, accessible, resilient, and secure alerts at national scale,” DAS said. APCO noted that to create alerts for streaming services, the FCC could bring together content providers and device manufacturers to “develop voluntary processes and protocols for delivering alerts directly to devices and across emerging platforms, including streaming services.”