The National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America, the International Air Transport Association and three other trade groups have asked House and Senate leaders to compel the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to delay the implementation of a rule that would affect the importation of dogs into the U.S.
Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., remain opposed to the Kids Online Safety Act, which is preventing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., from moving the bill by unanimous consent (see 2406200053).
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- State utility commissioners at the NARUC conference grappled Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court reversal of the Chevron doctrine. Loper Bright, “though not framed as a federalist decision," has "modest pro-state implications,” Wilkinson Barker’s Daniel Kahn said during a panel of telecom law experts. Earlier, an NTCA official told the NARUC Telecom Committee that his association plans to seek reconsideration of an FCC order on next-generation 911 if commissioners approve it at their Thursday meeting.
Allied Telecom Group is too late to challenge a 2015 procurement in which the District of Columbia Public Schools selected the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) DC-Net program to provide E-rate services, the city said Friday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (case 1:22-cv-00653-CJN). Last month, Allied said it sought to block the “cozy relationship” between D.C. Public Schools and OCTO. Seeking summary judgment against the telecom company and opposing summary judgment against itself, D.C. wrote: “This is a procurement dispute that could have -- and should have -- been raised in the proper forum at the proper time.” Allied waited seven years to sue, the District said. Also, the Telecom Act precludes “equitable private enforcement of the competitive bidding requirements of the E-rate program,” D.C. said. “But even if that were not the case, Plaintiff is not entitled to summary judgment because it fails to demonstrate any conflict between the federal requirements of the E-rate program and District procurement law generally or the 2015 bidding process related to the E-rate program specifically.”
An apparel factory owner and a trade policy professional from the apparel industry said it's critical to renew Haitian trade preferences this year, even though they don't expire for 14 months.
The Court of International Trade on June 17 (see 2406170037) -- in an opinion released publicly July 10 -- upheld a CBP finding that six companies didn’t evade antidumping and countervailing duties on aluminum extrusions from China by transshipping them through the Dominican Republic. Judge Richard Eaton explained that CBP had reasonably reinterpreted record evidence within the context of other information it had failed to consider previously.
T-Mobile challenged the FCC's 3-2 April decision (see 2404290044) fining the carrier for allegedly not safeguarding data on customers' real-time locations. The challenge was made at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Notices of apparent liability were proposed in 2020 against T-Mobile and other carriers under then-Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, but the commission’s two current Republicans, Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, dissented in April. Carr voted for the NAL in 2020, but raised concerns at the time. “The majority held -- for the first time” that customer proprietary network information (CPNI) “encompasses mobile-device location information that is unrelated to voice calls,” T-Mobile said in challenging the order in docket 24-1224. The carrier was fined more than $80 million, plus $12 million for violations by Sprint, which it subsequently acquired (see 2404290044). The order is “unlawful, arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and unconstitutional,” T-Mobile told the court. The location information cited “is not CPNI within the meaning of Section 222(h)(1)(A) [of the Telecommunications Act], as the statutory text, context, and Commission precedent make clear,” T-Mobile said: “At a minimum, the Commission failed to provide fair notice of its novel, expansive statutory and regulatory interpretations -- the Order punishes T-Mobile based on legal requirements that the majority adopted for the first time in this proceeding and retroactively applied to T-Mobile’s past conduct.” T-Mobile said it “adopted numerous safeguards to protect the privacy of its customers’ location data, and it acted promptly and decisively to stop rogue actors from misusing location data for unauthorized purposes.” On Monday, Jacob Lewis, FCC associate general counsel, filed to represent the agency in the case. T-Mobile also filed an appeal on behalf of Sprint in docket 24-1224.
Sustaining broadband networks is a “paramount objective” of the Nebraska Universal Service Fund (NUSF) high-cost program, especially with the "influx of federal and state deployment funding," the Nebraska Public Service Commission decided in a Tuesday order. Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday for two orders on state USF changes (docket NUSF-139) and to consider sanctions against Windstream for three separate 911 outages (docket 911-076).
House Commerce Committee Republicans launched a probe Tuesday of NTIA’s communications with state-level broadband offices related to the $42.5 billion broadband equity, access and deployment (BEAD) program. Long-standing Republican criticisms of BEAD, meanwhile, became a major issue during a House Communications Subcommittee hearing that morning on the FCC’s FY 2025 budget request (see 2407090049). Lawmakers sparred over the propriety of GOP Commissioner Brendan Carr publicly slamming the program.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel showed no willingness Tuesday to abandon a March Further NPRM that would ban bulk billing arrangements between ISPs and multi-dwelling unit owners (see 2403050069) despite bipartisan criticism during a House Communications Subcommittee hearing. She was similarly unmoved by GOP skepticism about a proposal requiring disclosure of AI-generated content in political ads (see 2405220061). During the hearing, Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr called for the FCC to backtrack on both proposals because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision and other rulings (see 2407080039).