USTelecom names James Marrow, ex-office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., communications manager ... With Nexstar Media’s close of its acquisition of a 75% ownership interest in the CW Network (see 2210030004), it names Dennis Miller, stepping down from board, as CW president, succeeding Mark Pedowitz, assisting transition … INE appoints Dara Warn, ex-Penn Foster, CEO, succeeding Richard McLain … Digerati Technologies, provider of cloud services, moves Derek Gietzen, president-Digerati subsidiary NextLevel, to company president … Hallmark Media hires Alice Rao, ex-Sony, as senior vice president-publicity.

California will make phone calls free for many incarcerated persons. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Keep Families Connected Act (SB-1008) Thursday, the Democrat’s office said. Newsom vetoed a telecom industry-supported bill (AB-2749) to put a shot clock on California Public Utilities Commission reviews of California Advanced Services Fund broadband grant applications and require wireless eligibility in CASF’s federal funding account. Newsom supported but sought refinements to AB-988 to implement the national 988 suicide prevention hotline with an 8 cent monthly surcharge on wireline, wireless and VoIP lines.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., and Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., led filing Thursday of the Broadband Grant Tax Treatment Act, in a bid to ensure broadband funding from the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act and American Rescue Plan Act doesn’t count as taxable income. The measure would amend the Internal Revenue Code to say broadband grants enacted via either statute don’t count as “gross income.” Every “dollar that was set aside to fund broadband expansion and deployment should be used for that purpose,” Warner said: “Taxing these broadband investments awards would be counter-productive, and could ultimately diminish efforts to give more Americans access to high-speed internet.” Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., is among four other senators who signed on as original co-sponsors. “Taxing broadband grants … will dramatically reduce the impact of these programs and likely leave the hardest-to-reach communities without essential connectivity for even longer,” said NTCA CEO Shirley Bloomfield. “It is critical that all broadband grant funds go toward their intended purpose of network deployment.” Requiring “grant recipients to return as much as 20 percent of those grants in the form of taxes jeopardizes our shared goal of universal connectivity,” said USTelecom Senior Vice President-Government Affairs Brandon Heiner. “It is vital that Congress move to eliminate this tax, as America’s broadband providers carefully plan and prepare to allocate resources to connect as many Americans as possible." Warner’s office also cited support from WTA.

USTelecom asked the FCC to maintain current rules on costs that arise from pole replacements and attachments (see 2208290047). The rules are "simple, effective and easy to apply," the group said in a meeting with Wireline Bureau staff, per an ex parte posted Monday in docket 17-84. Changing them would "not only do nothing to facilitate broadband deployment, it would likely undermine deployment goals and introduce competitive distortions and bad economic incentives," it said. The FCC should "enforce the rules that are already in place" and not "depart from its decades-long approach to the cost-causation principle," USTelecom said.

Industry groups continued to disagree whether the FCC should impose stricter requirements on certain voice service providers to curb illegal robocalls (see 2207150053). Some said the commission should extend Stir/Shaken obligations to all providers, while others sought continued flexibility and a technologically neutral approach on which industries any new rules would apply to.

The Wireless ISP Association urged Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to sign a broadband bill (AB-2749) to update the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grant review process and require wireless eligibility for funding. “An inclusive approach to broadband deployment smartly enlists the help of those on the ground, such as WISPA’s community-based providers, many of whom employ both fiber and fixed wireless technologies in their networks,” WISPA State Advocacy Manager Steven Schwerbel said Thursday. Consumer advocates earlier urged Newsom to veto the bill, saying it would hurt underserved communities (see 2209120062). Other industry supporters of AB-2749 include USTelecom and CTIA (see 2208290020).

Businesses will continue to seek a way forward on a concerning, soon-to-expire exemption in California's privacy law for employee and business-to-business (B2B) data, a California Chamber of Commerce (CalChamber) official told us Friday. Many privacy lawyers are warning businesses about the carve-out sunsetting at year-end due to the legislature failing to pass an extension. Starting Jan. 1, the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) is “really no longer just a consumer law,” said Sheppard Mullin’s Julia Kadish in an interview.

USTelecom asked the FCC to require that session initiation protocol (SIP) code 603+ be used as the "uniform method to notify callers that their calls have been blocked," in a meeting with Wireline and Consumer and Governmental Affairs bureaus staff. Citing ATIS and the SIP Forum's recent release of SIP code 603+, USTelecom said the new standard is "the best, most reasonable, and most efficient approach forward" because it "incorporated feedback from the calling community and more than adequately meets their needs" (see 2208250067). "Some calling-side equipment" may already be ready to receive the information from a 603+ response message, the group said in a filing posted Thursday in docket 17-59, and "we expect in most cases that modest software updates will be needed to make automated use of the information."

House Agriculture Committee leaders eyed how to address broadband issues in the 2023 farm bill during a Thursday hearing, with panel ranking member Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and some others noting dissatisfaction with the degree to which the $65 billion in connectivity money included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would affect rural areas. “Rural broadband will continue to be a major focus” for House Agriculture despite House passage of IIJA’s connectivity money instead of the panel-approved Broadband Internet Connections for Rural America Act (HR-4374), which included $43 billion to Rural Utilities Service programs for FY 2022-29 (see 2107140061), said panel Chairman David Scott, D-Ga.

The Utility Reform Network urged Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) to veto a broadband bill to update the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) grant review process. The legislature last month passed AB-2749, which would set a 180-day shot clock for the California Public Utilities Commission to decide CASF applications. TURN Executive Director Mark Toney told us he sent a letter Wednesday seeking Newsom's veto and a coalition of opponents including TURN plans to send a separate veto request later this week. Groups including American Civil Liberties Union, Public Knowledge, Center for Accessible Technology and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance joined an earlier coalition letter asking legislators not to pass the bill. Toney is verifying that they all will join the veto letter but hasn’t heard any group has changed its position, he said. USTelecom earlier urged Newsom to sign AB-2749; previous bill opponents Electronic Frontier Foundation and Rural County Representatives of California became neutral on the bill before it passed (see 2208290020). AB-2749 “is unnecessary, adopts a broken ‘shot clock’ detrimental to underserved communities, and undermines a recent CPUC decision,” Toney wrote in the TURN letter: The shot clock “could lead to either rushed or incomplete reviews of applications.” When the CPUC made program rules, the agency rejected AT&T’s call for a shot clock, Toney told us: Giving the carrier a “second bite at the apple” would be a “real abomination of the process.” Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign, the TURN official said. AT&T didn’t comment.